


A Stranger Visits

by kittyperpetua



Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: 1960s, 69 (Sex Position), Affairs, Angst, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Angst with a Happy Ending, Beach Sex, Blow Jobs, Canon Compliant, Churches & Cathedrals, Cunnilingus, Doctors & Physicians, Doggy Style, Dream Sex, Drinking, Eventual Smut, Extramarital Affairs, F/M, Face-Sitting, Fantasy, Feels, Flirting, Fluff and Smut, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Healing Sex, Heartache, Heartbreak, Hospital Sex, Hospitals, Hotel Sex, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Infidelity, Kissing, Loneliness, Love, Making Out, Masturbation, Masturbation in Shower, Memories, Office Blow Jobs, Oral Sex, Outdoor Sex, Pillow Talk, Prayer, Redemption, Romance, Secrets, Sexual Tension, Shower Sex, Soulmates, Strangers, Surgeons, Surgery, Tension, Time Travel, Underwater Sex, Wet Dream, Widowed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:07:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 31,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22316047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittyperpetua/pseuds/kittyperpetua
Summary: While practicing medicine in Boston in 1964, Claire struggles with her life's purpose and meaning. A stranger enters her life that reminds her of Jamie, and she begins to find herself again as she reckons with the life she's living being so different from the one she wanted.NOTE: For those who really don't want to mess with an original character, you can skip to chapter 18 for a hot Jamie/Claire scene. But I think if you start from the beginning you'll be charmed by Claire's time spent with a stranger during her years apart from Jamie!
Relationships: Claire Beauchamp/Jamie Fraser, Claire Beauchamp/Original Character(s)
Comments: 302
Kudos: 374





	1. Holy Orders

**Author's Note:**

> The first chapter establishes Claire in her life in Boston, where she is needed less and less by her teenage daughter, and gets little satisfaction outside of her work as a surgeon. In subsequent chapters, she will meet a stranger that brings her memories of a life she lived a long time ago. Though chapter one is quite melancholy, eventually this story will heat up—I'll adjust the rating accordingly when the time comes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've made a companion playlist to this story, based on a recommendation! Hope you enjoy: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5qxvpGggCa27bdXorBNdHI

Boston, 1964

Dr. Claire Randall sat at her desk, pausing from recording her notes from the morning’s surgery. She’d sensed a peculiar uneasiness in recent weeks, even more than usual, and aside from the time she spent in the operating theatre, or the lovely—but rare—moments she got to spend alone with Brianna, she felt unmoored. With her daughter a teenager now, growing more strong-willed and independent by the day, bless her, Claire was alone more often than not, other than when she was at the hospital. A trill of birdsong caught her attention outside on the fire escape, and a smile just barely curled up the corners of her mouth. “So how about if tomorrow we attempt to transplant a cadaver lung into the patient, hm?”

“What?” Claire furrowed her brow as she returned from her reverie. Her one close friend, colleague, and officemate Dr. Joe Abernathy was looking at her quizzically over his coffee. “Just checking to see if you were still on planet Earth, Lady Jane. Everything alright?”

Claire sighed, and pushed her queer feeling aside. “Yes, Joe. Sorry, what were you saying?”

“I wondered if you’d hazard a bet,” Joe began, jovially. “As to whether or not this new visiting attending will have as big of a stick up his ass as the last one.”

With a snort, Claire snarked, “I thought I’d seen quite a lot of unusual foreign objects stuck up asses when I was an intern in the E.D., but Carlson should have been studied for the textbooks.”

Joe chuckled in assent, then returned to his paperwork. Claire made to do the same, but gave one last glance out the window to see if her feathered visitor was still there. The bannister of the fire escape was empty. The chief of the trauma surgery department had announced his retirement, so a rotating roster of potential candidates for the position had been coming through to be considered. Doctors Randall and Abernathy had been told in no uncertain terms that Mass. General would not be seen to have a woman or a negro leading the department, so they’d done their level best not to antagonize the visiting applicants, although privately commiserating in their shared office.

Tomorrow, another prospective supervisor would be joining the team for a few days, and while Claire dismayed that he’d doubtless undercut her experience and knowledge, as well as Joe’s, at least a new personality on the staff provided a bit of variety in her daily life. For the past three years, at least, a pernicious and dull monotony had come to be a constant state of being for Claire. Brianna came to her less and less, more eager to spend time with friends or her father than Claire. She’d heard that was the way of it with teenage girls, but never having grown up with her own mother, it was impossible for Claire to truly understand.

Frank was, well… Frank. The three of them sat together for dinner once or twice a week, but with Claire’s unpredictable hours on-call, and his myriad social obligations about which she’d rather not devote too much thought, whole days could pass when the only evidence that the other was in their life was a bit of cologne lingering on a coat, or a forgotten teacup left half-empty on an end table. Claire’s rather unusual employment made it difficult for her to find friends, as her schedule hardly permitted for the sort of midday gatherings frequented by the other professors' wives.

As Claire drove home at the end of her shift at the hospital, she could easily have taken the car in circles, so unfocused was her attention. It did feel that something was pulling at her, and she had a nagging feeling that a change was coming. Although, perhaps that was just the Dylan track being spun on the car radio. Whilst waiting at an intersection, Claire did notice something odd. A small yellow bird, bright against the blustery Boston weather, seemed to hover a few feet in front of her windshield, as if pausing to catch her attention.

The light turned green, and the bird disappeared, flitting quickly off in the opposite direction than the one Claire would typically take home. There being few cars around, she deftly changed lanes and followed, unsure if her boredom was rendering her hysterical, like the medical textbooks of earlier decades might have suggested. Although, the cure for hysteria often being a good rogering with a vibrator, Claire supposed her own celibate recent history could be seen as a prerequisite for the condition.

Moments later, Claire found herself parked in front of a local church. Catholics were, of course, in no short supply in Boston, but aside from the perfunctory Christmas and Easter Masses, and a halfhearted attempt to engage Brianna in catechism during her childhood, the Randalls did not observe a particularly pious adherence to their religion. Still, Claire was moved to step inside the empty church, perhaps to find some quiet for her restless mind.

Well, not entirely an empty church. A middle-aged nun sat alone in a pew with her head bowed and her hands folded in her lap. Claire attempted to quietly take a seat on the other side of the aisle, but she jostled the kneeler that had been left unfolded and stubbed her shin on the hard wooden bench. Even deep in prayer, the nun would certainly have heard the whispered oath Claire took in the name of the Lord Jesus, and the late President Franklin Roosevelt as well, it would seem.

Hoping to avoid drawing any further attention, Claire kneeled, put her elbows on the back of the pew in front of her, and closed her eyes. Though she hadn’t so much as made the sign of the cross, let alone begun to recite any traditional prayers, her presence in the sanctuary was enough to open the lines of communication between what was in her heart, and what was in the heavens. Images drifted across Claire’s consciousness, unbidden, that both troubled and were a balm on her heavy heart.

A flickering reel of faces, flitting past as if on a zoetrope, tugging at a place within her that she rarely gave access to her thoughts. Her impossibly tiny baby, Faith, who’d never opened her eyes. The feel of her soft, perfect cheek against the pad of Claire’s finger, and the golden light that seemed to radiate from the downy red hair on her head. Fergus, the precocious young boy who’d been as a son to her, entrusted into her care by forces unknown. Jenny, Ian, and their children. Uncle Lamb, embracing her when she was younger than Brianna, and weeping over her first heartbreak. Her friend, Geillis, who'd sacrificed her own life to save Claire's. Her parents' faces, more of a hazy sketch than a clear picture. The men of Clan MacKenzie, lost in bloodshed on the moor. Thousands of young, injured soldiers crying out in a field hospital. Her husband, whose name she feared to say aloud, pushing her away from him as battle loomed. Pulling her close to him in a church, their wrists bound before a priest as he recited a blood oath in Gàidhlig.

“Would you allow me to pray for you, Missus?” The nun’s voice was gentle, but Claire was startled nonetheless. She had dropped her head onto the backs of her hands as she sank against the pew, and tears had stained her cheeks with diluted mascara. Claire gathered her wits about her and straightened. “Thank you,” she began, “though it’s not me that needs it. I’d be grateful if you’d pray for my family, though.”

The nun smiled, and extended her hand to rest on Claire’s, where they were still clasped on the bench in front of her. She looked down and noticed the wedding ring on the nun’s fourth finger, a symbolic token of her vows taken as a bride of Christ. “I’ll be sure to say a prayer for you and your family at this evening’s Mass. I’ll leave you to your privacy now, my child.”

Claire smiled up at her weakly as she removed her touch and quietly walked away. She looked down at the rings on her own hands, each signifying vows that she had made. On one hand, Frank’s gold band, given to her when she was hardly more than a child, on the eve of war, with little lived experience of what a married couple was supposed to look like, having been raised by a bachelor. On the other, the silver ring that bound her to her home—her true home—given to her in a time of uncertainty, but offering her a source of comfort and safety in the years since.

She thought of the nun, who had been so certain about her calling that she had forsworn all else. She remembered the Benedictine monks at the Abbey of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, and their conviction in every action that she witnessed, no matter how small. In many ways, Claire thought it might have been easier to live as a nun than to have lived as a wife when she returned through the stones in 1948. Then at least her ascetic life would seem to be in service of something greater than herself.

Of course, her life indeed did serve a greater purpose, and that was Brianna. The most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her was to have become a mother, and if living as a stranger in her own home, fighting the twin evils of boredom and loneliness, was the penance, then she’d do it all a thousand times over. And indeed, when she’d taken her oath to practice medicine, she’d found her calling as surely as any novitiate upon entering the convent. For it was there, in the operating room, where Claire truly came alive, learning new techniques and seeing to it that her patients were healed.

Suddenly, Claire realized, she was at peace. She had been led to this church by some force, and it had caused her to take stock of her life and remember the things that were most important to her. Her daughter, for whom she would risk all she had, and her vocation, to which she was a faithful servant. She rose to her feet and strode to the rows of votive candles flickering against one wall of the nave. She found a dollar in her purse and deposited it in the donation box before lighting one candle, for those she’d lost. With its flame, she lit another, for Brianna. Finally, she lit a third, for herself.


	2. An Outlander Walks Into a Bar

Claire was deep in concentration reading her patient’s chart as she made her unofficial rounds just before the start of her shift. The individual in the hospital bed was still dozing deeply, and would have to undergo further testing later in the day to assess whether yesterday’s resection of the bowel would be enough to mend his health and allow him to be discharged. A sharp male voice entered the room unbidden, from the doorway. “A bit jaundiced, yet. Ten dollars says he’ll need surgery on the biliary duct.”

The voice was unfamiliar to her, but the lilting cadence and rolled r’s plucked Claire’s attention like a harp string. The man was clearly Scottish, but lacked the broad accent of the Highlands that Claire knew so well. No, his voice was more refined, perhaps originating from Edinburgh, not unlike the city lawyer Ned Gowan, in whose close company Claire had once spent weeks. Still, she flushed a bit as she turned to the doorway, and was wordlessly puzzled by the figure she stood standing there. For a fraction of a second, she could have sworn it was Jamie, but older. The man was tall and broad-shouldered, and though his hair was a deep, reddish-brown, it was straight and close-cropped, parted neatly and smoothed to the side with a lustrous pomade.

Claire blinked a couple of times, reconciling this stranger with the man whom he reminded her of. ‘No,’ she thought, stupidly, ‘this man is nearly Frank’s age; Jamie… Jamie isn’t even thirty yet.’ Of course, that wasn’t even quite right. Jamie had died in his mid-twenties, over two hundred years ago. And Claire herself was in her mid-forties, although she often felt frozen in time from the day that she left him, despite the increasing strands of grey in her hair. Apparently nonplussed by her wordless greeting, the man pushed forward. “Dr. Stewart, ma’am. And I imagine you must be Dr. Randall?”

“Stuart? Yes, oh, hello. You’re the visiting surgeon?” Claire regained her composure and reached out her hand. His handshake was firm and a bit domineering, and Claire momentarily wondered when was the last time she had made physical contact with a man other than with her gloved hands inside an incision. She put down her patient’s chart and stepped out into the hallway, where the Chief of Medicine, a rotund, cotton-haired man named Dr. Quincy, stood just behind the prospective head of Trauma. Claire noticed the spelling of the name badge: “Stewart,” not quite what had first come to mind when she’d heard his name.

“Ahh, I see you’ve already met Mrs. Randall,” Quincy began, ignoring Claire’s dark expression when he failed to use her proper title. “I was just giving Dr. Stewart here a tour of the floor. Quite a bit different than your current hospital, I’d imagine, although I can’t imagine they do things too differently on the other side of the pond. Say, you two might have plenty to talk about, both being from England! I hadn’t even thought of that!”

“He’s from Scotland.”

“I’m from Scotland.”

Claire and the new doctor corrected Quincy simultaneously, who seemed hardly to understand or to care, as they two exchanged a curious glance. “Oh? Well, well, all fought on the same side against the Jerries, isn’t that right? Come now, we have some other personnel that it would be more prudent for you to become acquainted with.”

Before letting Quincy usher him along, Dr. Stewart extended his hand for another proper greeting. “Pleasure to meet you, Doctor,” he said genially.

Claire shook his hand and nodded with a smile acknowledging his show of respect for her position, before he moved to follow the Chief down the hallway, his long legs moving in short, brisk strides so as not to outpace the senior physician. She watched after him as he left, his white coat evidently custom tailored to suit his large frame. She’d grown so accustomed to the flat sounds of the New Englanders that were her daily colleagues and patients, that it was occasionally queer to hear the softened consonants of the British Isles coming from someone’s mouth other than her own, or Frank’s monosyllabic contributions to conversation. After the men turned the corner, Claire turned back to her work and carried on with her day.

Hours later, after a rather uneventful day, with the exception of a brief meeting held so that the staff at large could be introduced to the new applicant to be everyone’s boss, Claire and Joe were gathering their coats and umbrellas to head out for the day. “What do you say, Joe? Care for a martini before heading home for dinner?”

Claire knew that Brianna was having a sleepover with one of the girls from her class, and Frank had made vague references to evening plans with other faculty members, so she was loathe to head home so early to an empty house when it was too dark for her to even meditate in her garden. One drink with a friend would make her evening plans of watching The Donna Reed Show, alone in her pyjamas, seem less dismal.

Joe could read Claire’s expressions fairly well by now, and he felt a pang of sympathy for his sad and lovely friend. “One drink, Lady Jane,” he offered. “I promised Gail I wouldn’t be too late.”

The pair sat at the familiar bar around the corner from the hospital, and rose their martinis in a toast. “To Dr. Quincy,” Claire began mischievously, “may his decision be easy and just.” Joe rolled his eyes, then clinked his glass to hers. “To whichever white man deserves the better paycheck and schedule, over you and I, my dear.”

They spent an amiable half-hour nursing their drinks and catching up on the various exploits of their teenage children, before Joe signaled to the bartender to bring the check. As he reached for his wallet, Joe finished his observation of the day that had passed. “Well, I’m sure we’ll get to know more over the next couple of days, but at least he doesn’t seem like as much of a prick as Carlson was.”

“Ta, I should take that as a compliment, Dr. Abernathy,” said a voice from over Claire’s shoulder. The subject in question was approaching the bar, and reached to make his appraiser’s acquaintance. Joe, not one to be easily shaken in social situations like these, smirked, and greeted the fellow, standing to look almost eye-to-eye with him. “I’m off the clock. You can call me Joe.”

“Gavin,” said Dr. Stewart, by way of introduction. “Are you leaving? I had hoped to get to know my colleagues over a pint or some such, even if we’ll only be working together a couple of days.”

Joe began, “Ah, I’ve got to get home to the missus, and Claire—”

“I’ll stay for another,” Claire interrupted him. Joe wordlessly sent her a life preserver, in case she needed it, but she declined the offer with a small expression. Gavin smiled and took the barstool offered by the retreating Joe, who cast another curious glance at his friend as he lifted a brow and sauntered out.

The bartender approached, and Gavin ordered. “I’ll have a single-malt, neat, and the lady will have another martini.”

Claire tilted her head at the bartender, a Harvard Law student she’d become acquainted with during her and Joe’s not-infrequent visits. “No, Anthony, whisky will suit me fine,” she said to the young man.

“I owe you ten dollars,” Gavin began. She snorted, having dealt with the misplaced gallantry of more than a few of her or her husband’s colleagues over the years.

“I assure you, I can afford my own drink,” Claire retorted. Gavin chuckled. “I have no doubt, Dr. Randall. I checked in on your patient before I left the hospital. It seems his jaundice has already begun to abate.”

She’d also dealt with professional underestimation more than enough times. “Aggressive phototherapy,” Claire said, matter-of-fact. “He’ll require a few more treatments, but I didn’t see the urgency in ordering him to be opened up one more time.”

Gavin made a mock bow, as their drinks were delivered. He raised his to her in admiration, “I stand corrected.”

Claire regarded him, then lifted her glass as well. “Perhaps I should be the new Chief of Trauma? Slàinte,” she remarked, before tipping back for a long, slow draw on her drink. His eyes widened momentarily, then he met her challenge. “Slàinte, Dr. Randall.”

Softening, perhaps from the warmth of the whisky as it mingled with the martini she was chasing in her body, she extended an olive branch. “Claire is fine.”

“Claire. You’re a long way from home,” Gavin observed. Claire smothered a thought that he had no idea just how far. Roughly as many thousands of miles as he was, plus two hundred or so years. “Boston’s been my home for sixteen years now. What about you? Are you stateside already?”

Gavin shook his head. “No, Edinburgh’s still my home,” he said. Claire had been right about the accent, then. “And likely to stay that way, between you and I.”

Claire made a puzzled expression. “What, don’t think you’ve got the stuff for the job?”

“Oh, I ken I’d make an excellent candidate for it,” he said, his dialect losing some formality as he drank. “I just canna see uprooting my family, despite the attractive offer. Had to come out and see for myself before making the decision, o’course.”

Claire glanced at his wedding ring, and wondered what motives a married man on a business trip might have for drinking alone with a woman he’d met at work. “Did your wife come for a Boston holiday as well, then? To see for herself, of course?”

Gavin looked down at his hand. Claire suspected he felt chastened, but his pause was too long, and he took a bigger gulp of his whisky. “Ah, no, I’m a widower.”

Without thinking, Claire said out loud, “I’m widowed, as well.”

Gavin motioned to the bartender to bring a second round of whisky. “I thought,” he began, “someone said your husband is a professor at Harvard?”

Claire looked down at her own wedding rings. She felt a pang of guilt for having thought accusatorily about Gavin’s motives. Not that she didn’t know exactly what Frank was up to at this very moment, and with whom. She said simply, “I had another husband.”

They both enjoyed their drinks for a quiet moment, then Gavin ventured an inquiry, “Dè cho fada ‘s a bha thu a’ fuireach ann an Alba?”

“Come again?”

Gavin smirked, “Ah, I thought you might have the language. I was wondering how long you’d lived in Scotland for?”

Claire’s mouth fell open, and she wondered if everyone had the ability to read her thoughts, or if she was simply getting tipsy. Understanding her surprise, he motioned to the silver ring on her right hand. “Scottish thistle,” he explained, continuing, “I didn’t mean to pry about your late husband. Do excuse me, Claire.”

The note of formality reentered Gavin’s voice along with the apology. A bit of embarrassment turned the tips of his ears red, as was to be expected in a man with his coloring. Claire worried that if she started talking, she wouldn’t be able to stop, but it felt good to speak to someone who had some connection to her true self, the life that she’d left behind, no matter how tenuous. “Quite alright,” she said, haltingly. “Just about three years. A lifetime ago.” Looking for a way to return the conversation—and her thoughts—to the twentieth century, Claire added, “I did know quite a many Scots in the war, though.”

“Oh, aye?” Gavin gladly accepted the segue into another subject of conversation. “You weren’t in the WAAF, by any chance?”

Claire smiled, remembering the adrenaline she felt upon first enlisting. “No; Army. I was a field nurse.” Gavin chuckled at the dark bond shared by veterans of the front lines. “RAF,” he began. “Flight surgeon.”

Claire was impressed. “I’m surprised to hear you’re not Chief of Trauma already, somewhere,” she ventured. Gavin nodded, knowing all too well what many expected would have been the trajectory of his career so far. He reached for his wallet and pulled out a small photograph of a lovely teenage girl, so clearly his daughter by her facial features and lanky frame, but with almost white-blonde hair, which must have been the legacy of her late mother. “Iona. After my wife died, I needed to be both father and mother to her. It canna have been easy, for a girl to grow up without a woman in her life, but if it meant spending more time with her and less time after the next promotion, then it was worth it.”

Claire smiled, thinking of Brianna, whose own natural father had sacrificed everything so that she would grow up safely with a mother. “I was raised by my uncle,” Claire offered. “My parents died when I was very young, so it was just me in muddy trousers following along as he led me through childhood and adolescence the best way he could. I’m sure your daughter appreciates everything you’ve done for her.”

Gavin beamed at the portrait in his hand. “She was weel fashed before I left for this trip. The idea of taking her out of her school and her life to come all the way here… it’s no wonder an’ she’s cross with me.”

Claire understood. “My Bree is cross with me more often than she’s not.”

Gavin furrowed his brow. “Yer bree?”

“Brianna,” Claire added, to a nod of understanding. “Sixteen years old, going on thirty.” She swirled the last dregs of her whisky around her glass, thinking that she’d spent quite a bit longer talking to this man at the bar than she’d intended to. “Well,” she continued, changing her tone, "unless Quincy has certain charms that I myself am immune to, I imagine that you can tell Iona that there’s nothing here in Boston that would make you want to stay away from Scotland for very long.”

Gavin peered at Claire, suspecting that she had little to no understanding of how beautiful of a woman she was. Though perhaps that was just his widower’s solitude, making him think such things of a married woman; a colleague, at that. Despite himself, he couldn’t resist venturing one naughty overture. “Aye, if it weren’t for a certain professor at Harvard, then perhaps my opinion of what Boston has to offer could be quite different.”

Claire met his gaze, and flushed. This was different from the typical clammy line she was used to getting from men. It seemed to pluck a chord in her belly that was rarely ever played, except in her private musings. “Perhaps we’d better get the check,” she feinted. Adding, with a smirk to break the tension, “And don’t forget you owe me ten dollars!”


	3. Nocturnal Benediction

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating added, time for a bit of steaminess...

_ The hospital hallways were abuzz in a flurry of commotion as nurses and orderlies rushed to and fro. A loud voice boomed through a loudspeaker. “Dr. Randall, you are needed in O.R. 3; Randall to O.R. 3!” _

_ Claire’s hasty steps quickened to a sprint as she sped down the hallway. She was already wearing her operating scrubs. As she turned the corner, the hallway she found herself in was somehow longer and more crowded than the one she’d been in before. “Operating Room Three! Dr. Randall! Mistress Beauchamp!” _

_ Claire was running at full speed now, pushing people out of the way as she saw O.R. 3 ahead. Finally she reached it and barreled through the door, her full skirts swishing as it shut behind her, and she found herself on the stone steps leading down into the Beaton’s surgery. A nurse called to her from below, “Mistress Beauchamp, quick! We’re losing him!” _

_ She advanced toward the table, eager to save her patient, who at this point was only being kept stable by an oxygen mask and anesthesia. She called for her scalpel and prepared to operate. The patient’s breathing slowed to a normal pace, and he reached up for her, gently closing his hand around hers. “Dinna fash, Sassenach,” he said in a soothing voice. _

_ They were alone in the room now, Claire standing beside the table in her everyday work attire, a sensible blouse and pencil skirt keeping her looking prim and proper beneath her white coat. Jamie lay before her, his shirt laying in tatters around him where it had been torn off by Dougal to show off the scars of his battles. Not only the healed lines she knew were covering his back, but a puckered bullet wound through his trapezius, and a slice across his left oblique. His left hand held her right hand to his chest, his crooked middle fingers (healed well from her efforts to set them) warm against the silver ring on her fourth finger. _

_ “There you are, Jamie,” Claire said, a tidal wave of relief flooding her veins as she looked down at her husband, and touched him. She drank him in, casting her eyes from the tousled red mane of his hair to his well-appointed boots. “Are you in pain?” _

_ “No, mo cridhe,” he assured her, “but I can see that you are.” Now Jamie was standing beside the table, looking protectively down at his patient as Claire held his hand against her chest. He stroked her hair with his left hand and chuckled. “Mo nighean donn, ye look bonny even with your curls tamed into submission.” _

_ “Oh Jamie,” Claire sobbed, tears rolling down her cheeks and staining the wooden table dark. Softly he cooed and chuffed, like he was calming an injured horse, and brought his face to hers, anointing her with feather-light kisses on her forehead, eyelids, tear-stained cheeks, and lips. He had no ear for music, but as he caressed her face and hair gently, he hummed the nursery rhyme that used to quiet Brianna when she was a baby. _

_ “I’ve been praying for you, Sorcha,” he called her by her Scottish name, his voice no louder than a whisper. “For you to be healed as you have healed me so many times over. I pray you safe, and protected. I pray you health and happiness. I pray that it will be the two of us one day, blood of my blood, bone of my bone.” _

_ Claire felt his words as if they were an incantation. She looked deep into his bright blue eyes, and asked, “How will I be healed?” _

_ Wordlessly, Jamie bent to her again, kissing her deeper this time, on her mouth, tracing his tongue on the side of her neck, and gently caressing the swell of her breast just inside the collar of her blouse. She bent her legs and turned to him, reaching to pull him to her. He reached under her hip and lifted her slightly off the table as he rucked his kilt up over his thighs, and knelt between her knees, hands planted on either side of her. She reached down to slide her skirt up, but Jamie had already pushed the fabric aside as he bore down upon her, his breath growing ragged as he prepared to drive himself into her. _

With a start, Claire awoke in a damp tangle of nightgown and bedclothes, perspiration beaded on her neck and face, sheets clenched tight in her fists. She felt slippery and hot, and peered over to the other side of the room where Frank’s bed lay empty, him apparently having decided not to make the trouble of coming home. She peeled her gown off over her head and tossed back the covers, letting the cold air in the room blanket her sweating body.

Her nipples hardened as the chilly breeze kissed them, and she languidly trailed her fingers to slide underneath her panties. Claire’s fingers danced in and around the slippery folds of herself, and she pressed her thighs together around her hand to create more friction as she brought herself quickly to climax, allowing her back to arch as she bucked against the bed, and crying out at full volume in her empty house.

Exhausted, and relieved, she closed her eyes and breathed in the night air, uttering a silent thanks to Jamie’s ghost for visiting her tonight. She curled over and began to lull back into a state of sleep, with visions of Jamie in a suit and white coat, toasting her with his glass of whisky, floating through her mind.


	4. A New Friend

Claire strode into her office upon the start of work the next day, and blinked several times to determine if the surprising image she saw was actually real. A small bouquet, hardly larger than a nosegay, sat invitingly on her desk. Surely they’d been delivered to the wrong recipient. Frank hadn’t sent her flowers since shortly after Brianna was born, and certainly not since she’d had an office and her own place of employment to visit each day. And while Jamie had always been far too practical to offer her cut flowers unless he knew she’d sought them for some medicinal purpose, his gifts to her had been no less romantic. She moved her fingers momentarily to her neck, imagining there a strand of freshwater pearls that had been his mother’s.

As she got closer to the bouquet, though, she knew without a doubt that it had been meant for her. Three small white roses, just on the verge of blossoming, surrounded by dusky greenery and fuzzy, blue-purple thistle heads, their spiky leaves seeming in stark contrast to the delicate rose petals. The flowers sat in a simple glass vase, the size of a small urn, resting on a tiny florist’s envelope. She opened it to find a handwritten note and a crisp ten dollar bill. The note read, “My apologies for any unprofessionalism. It’s braw to have a friend that’s walked some of the same paths in life as one’s own.”

The sender hadn’t signed the note, but Claire snorted, sure that the chaotic handwriting belonged to a doctor, not an employee of the flower shop. She dropped into her chair feeling a bit as if she’d just sprinted up a flight of stairs, and clutched the note tight to her stomach. A small, throat-clearing noise from across the room made her blanch, and she slowly turned toward it. Joe sat with one leg crossed over the other and a hand resting on his chin, smirking at her as if he’d been waiting in this position for hours. Claire knew that her glass face was doing her no favors, and she lamely offered, “What?”

Through his smile, Joe teased, “Well, aren’t we the cat that caught the canary?”

“Pardon _me_ ,” Claire said, attempting to affect an air of immunity, before busying herself putting aside her purse and moving the vase to the corner of her desk, against the windowsill and out of the way. Joe offered no retort, but continued looking at her like an academic studying something peculiar under the microscope. Digging her grave further, Claire continued talking, “They’re from Frank.”

Joe laughed at that, barking a single, loud, “Ha!” Of course, he would know that in the years since he and Claire had been friends, her husband had not once sent a token of affection to their office. Heat rose in Claire’s face, and she continued, defensively, “Apology flowers, if you must know! I… haven’t been seeing a lot of him lately.”

The truth of this last statement was evident, and Joe’s body language softened. Claire looked him in the eye now, knowing the jig was up and never had a chance of fooling him, and with some exasperation, she pleaded, “Now is this the part where you tell me to be careful?”

Joe thought for a moment, then leaned forward and met Claire’s gaze with a supportive, brotherly intensity. “To hell with that,” he said, surprising her. “This is the part, LJ, where I tell you that you deserve to be happy for once.”

Tears sprang to Claire’s eyes, but she blinked them back. Joe nodded at her, then slowly returned to his business, leaving her to run her index finger under her lashes and stem the tide as she regained her composure. She glanced once more at the flowers, and felt some warmth return to her cheeks as she smiled. An almost imperceptible movement outside the window just beyond caught her eye. She could swear she saw a familiar yellow bird alight before flittering quickly away.


	5. Business or Pleasure?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone for your supportive comments! I'm really enjoying exploring how Claire may have gotten her groove back during the twenty years she spent apart from Jamie. I decided to take a bit of time investigating Gavin's point of view in this chapter, so the timeline backs up a few hours...

Gavin stepped into the taxicab and gave the address for his hotel. Mass. General had put him up in a fairly impressive suite, and while he felt some guilt for knowing that he was unlikely to accept the job offer after taking advantage of expensive lodging and first class airfare, he wouldn’t deny that he enjoyed feeling a bit like he was on a luxurious holiday when the porters in their pillbox hats opened the lobby doors for him. Come to think of it, this may have been the first week he’d spent out of town, on his own, since before he was married. Whenever Iona was on a break from school, they’d drive to Perth to visit her grandparents, or occasionally take the train to London so that he could take her to the theatre or the Royal Ballet.

Immediately upon entering his room, he slid his feet out of his brogues and fell heavily onto the bed. His skull hit a small, solid mass, and he reached to find he’d broken a chocolate bonbon wrapped in gold foil that had been resting on his pillow. He peeled it open and popped the shattered candy into his mouth, sighing as he enjoyed the treat. It had been a long day of introductions and having to stay stage-ready, walking up and down miles of hospital hallway, and not even getting to glove up. Despite the annoyance of feeling like a show pony, he had looked forward to getting in the operating room and having the opportunity to work on techniques with fellow physicians, learning from surgeons who’d been trained at some of the best medical schools in America.

Regardless of the fatigue he felt emotionally, Gavin’s circadian rhythm was too disrupted from travel for him to feel ready for sleep. He peered at his wristwatch and quickly calculated that, despite the time difference, it was too early to call his daughter and ask her how her day had been. His sister was looking after her while he was away, and he hoped that the excitement of spending a few days with Auntie Heather was beginning to take away her ire at him for even considering the transfer.

He turned his head to the right and looked at the smooth expanse of the duvet. Of course the housekeeping staff had impeccably pressed and made the bed so that it looked like a showroom sample, but even in a hotel he found himself relegated to the left side of the mattress, unable to find comfort if he ever rolled to his wife’s side. It had been nearly five years, but he still felt Mary’s presence when he turned to the right, expecting to smell her perfume on the pillow. He breathed in deep, but could not find her.

Claire Randall had worn a lovely perfume, he remembered. It smelled, oddly enough, somehow... _American_. He thought that whenever well-meaning ladies at work, or at Iona's school, approached him to ask after his daughter, and occasionally attempt to set him up on a date with a sister or a friend, that they smelled as if they’d been dunked in rosewater like Achilles by the heel, so acrid and infantile. Claire’s scent was more herbal than floral, and in fact, smelled almost masculine. He wondered if she didn’t wear a men’s sandalwood fragrance instead of a syrupy treacle with a fluffy pink atomizer on the bottle.

‘Goodness, mate,’ he thought to himself, ‘dinna be daft.’ It wasn’t that he hadn’t felt attraction to other women in the years since losing his wife. He’d catch a smile from a shopgirl or feel his heart beat a bit faster when he saw women walking around in those new miniskirts, legs out for all to see. But there was a feeling, a small drumbeat in his belly, that felt at once brand new and oddly familiar. He realized it was not just attraction, but desire. Desire to see a woman again, enjoy her company, lean down into her collarbone and smell her…

“Yer a fool, Stewart,” he said out loud this time, and got up off the bed. He’d even intimated as much, mentioning the spectre of her husband while they were sharing drinks. The woman was married, and he was an interloper, passing through town like a ship in the night. He strode over to the record player that was part of his suite’s amenities, and thumbed through the discs on offer. He snorted derisively at the lack of taste possessed by whomever it was that stocked the hotel’s rooms. ‘Christ, who the hell wants to listen to this much Pat Boone,’ he wondered, then reasoned, ‘probably whoever picked Canadian whisky for the minibar.’

Idly, he wondered what kind of music Claire liked to listen to, and he could almost feel her hand in his as if he might be asking her for the next dance. She hadn’t seemed offended when he’d ventured a bit of flirtation, but she had blushed. She really was a magnificent woman, beautiful glowing skin even under the unflattering lighting where he’d first seen her, at the hospital. It wasn’t ordinary for a married woman to spend an evening out having drinks with a man, though clearly she’d intended initially just to share some company with Dr. Abernathy. He knew they’d been working together a long time, and had to imagine that as much of a bastard as Quincy had already shown himself to be in one day, he’d been trying the nerves of the hospital’s first woman and negro doctors for a decade now.

And that was quite it: Claire—Dr. Randall—was no ordinary woman. Her reputation had preceded her when he’d begun making inquiries about the hospital to which he was being recruited. For being a female surgeon, of course, but also for being a rare talent. He believed he’d have the opportunity to operate alongside her at some point during his visit, and he hoped it would be tomorrow. Suddenly he felt excited, almost as if his collar had tightened around his neck. He removed his tie and cuff links, preparing for a cold shower before bed. He clearly needed one. Thinking about performing surgery with the woman made him feel like he had when he was a younger man, looking forward to seeing the pretty librarian at the University Medical School, as if he was going to offer to carry her books and ask her to join him for dinner.

He stepped into the massive clawfoot tub and ran the tap. Bracing for icy water, he clenched his muscles, but the showerhead instantly let out a perfectly toasty torrent. ‘They must have better water pressure in Boston,’ he thought, ‘and a well-maintained furnace in this swanky hotel.’ The warm water soothed his shoulders, where he carried so much tension, and he began to relax, placing his palms against the tile wall and leaning forward, letting the long hours of the day melt away. It didn’t take long before he realized his cock had stiffened and was flat against his belly as he bathed.

Feeling momentarily embarrassed, and truly remembering what it felt like to be a student with a crush, he tried to push the image of Claire out of his mind. She had come to him unbidden, just a glimpse of her slip as she crossed her long legs on the barstool beside him. Of course, now that he was trying not to think of her, his mind would only chase down more memories of that lovely face and figure. A twinge of guilt settled behind his breastbone as he began to stroke himself, but if he was to get any sleep tonight before another long shift tomorrow, he might as well just let his subconscious lead for a few minutes.

En route to the hospital the next morning, he asked the cabbie to let him off a few blocks early when he saw an upscale florist opening for the day’s business. He’d slept as soundly as Rip Van Winkle, and was starting his day with a bit of extra pep in his step. It seemed a friendly enough overture to send Dr. Randall a token, and if she wanted nothing to do with him, then no harm done. If, however, she didn’t mind a few days of innocent flirtation, then it might just make this visit a bit more fun.

The florist was surprised by his choice of thistle, especially when he said he’d like the flowers delivered to the hospital, as most patients received more cheerful looking arrangements, with carnations and chrysanthemums in bright pinks and reds being the most popular selections. But though he was sure she’d appreciate the significance of the white roses, he thought, ‘Och, in for a penny, in for a pound, aye?’

The florist handed him a blank note, upon which he thought to apologize for having been a bit too forward with Claire last night. He mostly wanted to apologize for the way he’d thought about her when he was privately in his ablutions, but thought that best left unremarked upon. Taking pains to keep his penmanship more legible than usual, he signed, “Yours, Gavin.” Then he blushed, his ears going pink, as he felt suddenly self-conscious at how personal that looked.

He asked for a second card and crumpled up the first. “I respect your status as a colleague, and sincerely meant no offense with either my words or actions. Best, Dr. Gavin Stewart.”

The pen had hardly left the paper before he crumpled up the second attempt and reached across the counter for a third blank notecard. He hastily scrawled the truth of it, that it had been fine to meet a woman such as herself, and left the note without signature. He slipped a folded bill into the envelope in reference to his one-sided bet, paid the florist, and went on his merry way.


	6. On the Front Lines

Claire stood over the massive steel sink and scrubbed, her fingers pink and raw with the soap she massaged into her knuckles, under her fingernails, and up to the elbows. The door eased open and Dr. Stewart backed in, having used his hip to open it and keeping his hands aloft. He joined her at the sink and began his own ritual disinfecting, vigorously lathering what Claire now saw to be quite furry arms, a thick coat of ginger hair getting quite the shampooing. She also noticed an angry gash, many years since healed, that ran up the length of the inside of his left arm, past the elbow, and under his shirt sleeve. It was a wonder that a wound like that hadn’t cost him his life; many people had met their end with far smaller incisions made so near the ulnar artery.

“So you’re on my service today, Dr. Stewart?” Claire thought it best to use family names as they were, in Joe’s words, currently on the clock.

“Aye,” he replied, “and happy to see the famous Dr. Randall in action.” Claire’s eyebrows lifted, and she felt a swell of pride. “Famous? Goodness, I’m hardly Doris Day.”

“I’ll say,” Gavin joked. He caught her glance at his scar, but she didn’t seem troubled by it, and her attention didn’t linger. “Thank you for the flowers,” she said quietly, despite there being no one else in the prep room.

“Ah, they’re just a wee thing,” he said, looking over at her instead of down at his busywork.

“So,” Claire continued, “you’re scrubbing in? Most of the other prospective department heads have conducted their observations from the theatre.”

Gavin asked, genuinely, “What’s the fun in that?”

Years of experience gave Claire reason to suspect that his interest in joining her in the operating room had something to do with his estimations of her skill as a surgeon. Before she could admonish him to remember that it was her patient, and that her instructions only were to be leading the course of action, Gavin preempted her train of thought. “You’ve naught to worry about, Dr. Randall. He’s your patient and though I may ask questions, I’m at your service to lend a hand if need be. Otherwise, I’m present merely as a spectator.”

He finished rinsing and exited to the operating room. Claire followed moments later, and they were both garbed in additional protective layers by the scrub nurses. Soon, only her eyes were visible beneath the ruched bonnet covering her hair, and above the paper mask. As gloves were fitted snugly onto her hands, she listened intently to the assisting physician who repeated the details of the patient’s injury.

She dispassionately began choreographing her plan of action upon hearing that the patient had presented in the E.D. with a GSW, but that no exit wound had been identified during intake. Later, she would feel a weight added to her spirit, that another young person had been maimed by violence in this bloody world. But now was the time for action, and it was with her surgical tools that she could fight back against the insistent onslaught of ultimately meaningless conflict.

As she began calling instructions out to the assembled team of nurses and doctors, Claire’s voice took on a timbre that surprised Gavin, and he wondered momentarily if she were being amplified somehow. She exchanged inquiries with the anesthesiologist before making her first incision, and upon seeing that the patient’s breathing remained steady, she remarked, “God bless opioids,” garnering a murmur of agreement from the other physicians, all of whom had been practicing long enough to remember the risks associated with operating on a patient using only ether to keep them comfortable.

Gavin stood back, occasionally relocating from one part of the room to another to observe different surgical staff and get a new angle on the operation as it was underway. He noticed something odd, however, and it took him a moment to figure it out. Though Claire was on the tall side for a woman, the operating table had been lowered a few inches to suit her height, and it was relatively easy for him to get a good look at her handiwork regardless of his vantage point. At six-foot-four, he typically elevated his workspace, and rarely encountered a surgeon who was in the habit of doing the opposite.

He was able to observe Claire in her element, and it seemed as though she had forgotten about him entirely. She was strictly focused on the task at hand, and behaved as if she were alone in the room with the patient being the only other person on earth that mattered. Finally it occurred to him what struck him about her as being so different to most of the other doctors he worked with. Though each has his own peculiarities, and it’s critical that all are able to control the surgical environment, many doctors he knew had been lifelong students, the hospital yet another circle of society in which to engage with fellow gentlemen of the profession (and nurses).

Claire had clearly been in battle, many times. Her command of the proceedings was almost identical in every way to his Squadron Leader’s, a career military man who’d served in the trenches when Gavin himself was still a lad. A long-forgotten ache shot up the length of his left arm as he remembered the day that had taken so many of his fellow airmen’s lives. “An assist please, Dr. Stewart.”

So she hadn’t forgotten he was in the room. Not one to disobey a direct order, he was by the operating table in one stride. He could see at once that the patient was losing blood too fast to survive if only one pair of hands was administering cautery and stitches, but respectfully waited for the order to proceed. Claire immediately directed him to begin suturing, and he quickly did so, as she stanched the flow of blood from the tissue in her line of sight.

“Begin packing,” Claire ordered, and the two surgeons started filling space with absorbent cloths as quickly as the nurses could provide them. The flow of blood had slowed considerably, and the patient’s heartbeat regained steadiness, his chest rising and falling under the careful supervision of the anesthetist. “Just fine,” Claire remarked, “no danger of abscess now, though we’ll keep him under close observation.”

She looked up now and smiled at Gavin, her eyes crinkling as she internally celebrated a job well done, a life saved. The mood of the assembled staff immediately lightened, and it was clear that now she was ready to be present with her comrades in medicine, as she began thanking each of the nurses and assisting physicians by name. “Thank you, Dr. Stewart,” she said, her voice sounding almost adolescent with the adrenaline of surgery flowing through her veins.

“Nae matter,” he replied, certain that she could easily have asked a junior resident to provide the assistance that he had given. The notion was confirmed when she turned to said resident and gave one last command. “Dr. Cole, would you partially close and accompany the patient to the ICU for follow-up?”

As they discarded their gloves, masks, gowns, and bonnets, Claire and Gavin shared an easy chuckle, the giddiness of a successful surgery no less exciting after years spent working with the scalpel. “How are you feeling?” Claire asked, as she fluffed out her thick bouffant of hair, a bit damp at the temples with the sweat of hard work.

‘Smitten,’ he thought, but had the presence of mind to say instead, “Grand! And yourself?”

He could swear she saw her lashes flutter as if her heart had beaten irregularly, momentarily interrupting her breathing. She beamed at him and repeated, “Grand.”


	7. Turn! Turn! Turn!

The phone rang four times before an out-of-breath voice answered. “Randall residence?”

Claire smiled at hearing her daughter on the other end of the line. “Brianna! I hoped you’d be home from school already.”

“Hi Mom,” came a disinterested reply. The springtime rains had been relentless for weeks, but today it seemed as though summer was right around the corner. Maybe the days were just beginning to get a little longer, or that outside it was brisk but less overcast. Or, maybe it was only Claire, feeling like she was taking in her surroundings a bit more cheerfully than usual. “It’s such a lovely afternoon, Bree, what do you say I pick you up and we go out for dinner?”

“Oh, um,” Brianna was a bit annoyed—she was sure she’d told her mother she’d made plans. Or, she’d meant to, at least. “I’m going back to Suzie’s, remember? We’re going to spend the weekend getting people to write letters to President Johnson protesting what’s happening in Vietnam. There’s that rally happening at MIT.”

“Of course,” Claire pretended, fairly certain that Brianna hadn’t mentioned anything. “You will be careful, won’t you? I don’t want to hear from Suzie’s mother that she hadn’t known you girls were planning to be there.”

“Yes, Mom,” Brianna groaned. Claire heard Frank’s voice in the background. “Well,” she asked, “would you like me to pick you up and give you a ride to Suzie’s, then?”

Brianna muffled the handset to continue her sidebar on the other end of the line. “That’s okay. Daddy’s going to drop me off; he says it’s on his way.”

Claire made attempts to interject, but couldn’t be heard over the jovial back-and-forth that Brianna and Frank were having simultaneously. “Okay, we gotta go now, but I love you!”

“I love you, too,” Claire said to the dial tone after Bree hung up. She sighed, feeling a bit despondent that she was the only member of her family without a robust social calendar, as usual. The afternoon sun was still streaming in the window, and the sound of the city rustling through the trees beckoned. Brianna was becoming political like many young people do, and also probably excited to impress long-haired college peaceniks. Frank was “on his way” somewhere or other, Joe’s shift had ended early, and Claire didn’t want to let the rest of the day go to waste.

As if in answer to her conundrum, a knock sounded at her office door. Claire turned to see Gavin standing in the doorway, briefcase in one hand and his jacket slung over his arm. “Dr. Stewart, how may I help you?”

“I hope I’m no’ interrupting?” It seemed the polite thing to say although, truth be told, Gavin had waited a few minutes outside the doorway when he heard Claire’s dulcet tones as she finished up her phone call.

“Not at all, Dr. Stewart,” Claire replied, while gathering her personal effects. “I’m dallying; my shift’s been over for twenty minutes. Please, come in.”

Gavin stepped past the threshold but didn’t show any signs of setting his belongings down to make himself at home. He’d been rehearsing the perfect conversation starter for at least the past hour, and tried to channel the flirtatious air of confidence he hadn’t put into practice for many years. “Well I have a bit of a conundrum and thought you, being the mum of a teenager, might be able to point me in the right direction.”

Claire made a skeptical expression, not sure how much of an expert she was with teenage daughters at the moment. “I’ll do my best… although if the subject is menarche, then I should hope they walked you through that in medical school.”

Gavin sputtered a bit laughing at that; the woman certainly had a way of disarming him. “Ah, no, I’ve got that well enough in hand,” he said with a smile. “I did want to find a bonny souvenir for my Iona, mind,” he continued. “But between Quincy and the other department heads, I’m afraid I’m no more inspired than I was wi’out their fine ‘advice.’”

She was tickled to imagine what nonsense the men in the department had offered, very few of them likely to have ever sustained a half-hour’s conversation with their daughters; those that had them. “Let me guess… stethoscopes? Rubber gloves? Asking the secretary to go pick something up?”

“Ah, no’ quite that bad,” Gavin allowed. “I was hoping _you_ might be able to suggest something that doesna require me taking a taxi to Fenway Park, being yourself a fellow loyal subject of the Queen,” he joked.

“Blasphemy!” Claire exclaimed in mock horror. “I’ve been an American citizen for nearly a decade now! Go on talking about that monarchy of yours and I’ll be forced to dispose of at least a dozen Lipton tea bags in the harbor.”

The two shared an easy laugh, growing more comfortable as the conversation carried on without any other colleagues or bystanders to cause either of them to feel insecure. “I didna ken if you might know of a certain shop I ought to track down, where local girls might find wee trinkets or perfume, or…?”

Claire thought for a moment, about how nice it was to just be carrying on, exchanging easy banter with a new friend, feeling as if she’d known him for years. In some ways it was like the refuge she sought with Joe, to chat with someone who sees you on an even playing field with them, and gives you the freedom to truly be yourself in their presence. But she couldn’t deny that there was also a jittery feeling that rushed through her when she’d been around Gavin. The sound of his voice with those particular Scots quirks, and the way his smile curled up higher on one side. She hadn’t wanted to waste this lovely afternoon, after all…

“Well, my daughter’s been fancying herself quite the student revolutionary lately,” she offered. “If I were in the market to get a gift for her, I’d likely start at the record store. Maybe you can find something that hasn’t yet made it to Edinburgh?”

“I am in your debt, Dr. Randall,” he said while taking a mock bow. “Any vendor in particular? I’m certain I could just ask the cabbie to lead the way, but…”

She took the bait. “Nonsense. I’m driving.”

Gavin felt a bit nervous getting into the passenger seat of Claire’s car. His instinct had been to open her door for her, but he wasn’t sure if that rule applied when the lady was driving. Stranger still when the driver sat on the wrong side of the car. It was only about a ten minute trip across the Charles River to Cheapo Records, during which they exchanged pleasantries, and Gavin tried very hard not to keep drawing his attention to Claire’s lovely long legs as she shifted gears and her skirt inched up her thighs.

Once they got into the shop, they parted ways, Claire browsing idly a few rows over while Gavin sought the assistance of the pimply-faced sales clerk. Hands full with a sampling of suggestions, Gavin was led to the listening booth at the back of the shop. He brushed Claire’s arm as he passed by her, and he looked over to see what albums she was browsing. Herbie Hancock and John Coltrane… somehow he hadn’t pegged her for a jazz aficionado, but now he could picture her in a smoky club, wearing black pants and a turtleneck like Audrey Hepburn in _Funny Face_.

The store employee set the records to spin and then left Gavin to stand alone in the narrow alcove where customers could sample music before making a purchase. He looked at Claire as the first song played, and she looked up to meet his gaze. The ambient sound in the record shop was drowned out as he listened to harmonious singing and folk guitar.

 _Let me live in the warmth of your smile  
_ _Let them see you with me  
_ _Let them wish they could be  
_ _As lucky as me  
_ _To have you here  
_ _To hold you oh so near  
_ _Oh yeah, oh yeah_

As Gavin luxuriated in the unbroken eye contact he and Claire were sharing, he felt emboldened by the song. With a wordless motion of his head, he beckoned her to him. She hesitated for only a moment before walking towards him. He had to turn to the side to make space for her to join him under the overhang that captured the music in the booth, and he stooped slightly so as not to hit his head against the cover.

The two of them were enveloped by the sound and stood mere inches apart, eyes scanning parts of each other’s faces as they let the song wash over them. In some ways, they were not alone in the cozy booth, as neither could quite experience the feeling of electricity that flows between two people who want each other, without the memories of their beloveds swelling in their hearts. Gavin thought of Mary playing the piano when she was pregnant, so that Iona could listen to it before she was even born. Claire remembered huddling close with Jamie under trees and archways in the cold Highland rain. Also, they thought of the mystery of the person standing before them, uncharted territory despite their muscle memories aching to draw each other near, and delight in the release of joining with another body.

The track wound down, and the B-side flipped to play.

 _Every time I see you smile, come to me, don't be long  
_ _Let me tell you how my heart goes wild  
_ _Please let me love you and it won't be wrong  
_ _Every time you're in my arms, come to me, don't be long_  
_You know that I'll never do you no harm_  
_Please let me love you and it won't be wrong_

The song concluded, and Claire and Gavin stood still, their hearts pounding in the deafening silence. Neither made a move; not to leave, not to touch, not even to reach for another record.

“What did you think? Pretty groovy, right?” The pimply-faced sales clerk stood eagerly just outside the booth. Annoyed, Gavin wondered if the kid made his wages based on commission. He motioned to Claire to lead the way, extending his hand in an ‘after you’ sort of gesture. As he ducked a bit to turn towards the employee, he rested his hand on the small of Claire’s back, and left it there just a heartbeat too long for propriety.

“Oh, it’s… verra fine. But they’re called ‘The Beefeaters’? I did hope to get something distinctly American,” Gavin explained. The young man was determined to make his sale. “Oh, they’re from California, sir! I don’t know why they’re called this on the single; the studio album’s set to come out next year under a new name: The Byrds.”

Claire looked quizzically at the clerk, and couldn’t help but think of the small feathered friends who had frequently been coming to visit, of late. Gavin made to follow the young man to the counter with his intended purchase, but he slipped another record under his arm as he walked back to the front of the shop. Perhaps a bit of smooth, sultry jazz would be just the thing to listen to instead of the hokey albums that had come included in his hotel suite.

The pair stepped outside onto the sidewalk as the sun was casting its last rays of the day and giving way to evening. Neither wanting the outing to end, Claire and Gavin spoke over each other seeking something to say.

“I’m starvin’!”

“How about a drink?”

“Would ye care to…”

“I could eat!”

Chuckling at their own, and the other’s awkwardness, and both feeling less than half their proper age, they turned to walk down the street to the next block over, where there looked to be a number of cozy restaurants and pubs. The night was just beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To everything (turn, turn, turn)  
> There is a season (turn, turn, turn)  
> And a time to every purpose, under heaven
> 
> A time to be born, a time to die  
> A time to plant, a time to reap  
> A time to kill, a time to heal  
> A time to laugh, a time to weep
> 
> To everything (turn, turn, turn)  
> There is a season (turn, turn, turn)  
> And a time to every purpose, under heaven
> 
> A time to build up, a time to break down  
> A time to dance, a time to mourn  
> A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together
> 
> To everything (turn, turn, turn)  
> There is a season (turn, turn, turn)  
> And a time to every purpose, under heaven
> 
> A time of love, a time of hate  
> A time of war, a time of peace  
> A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing
> 
> To everything (turn, turn, turn)  
> There is a season (turn, turn, turn)  
> And a time to every purpose, under heaven
> 
> A time to gain, a time to lose  
> A time to rend, a time to sew  
> A time for love, a time for hate  
> A time for peace, I swear it's not too late


	8. It Won't Be Wrong

Claire and Gavin sat across from each other in a booth nestled cozily in a small but bustling restaurant, sharing a carafe of wine as they slowly picked at their dinners. Nearly two hours passed as they got to know each other better, comparing notes about their beloved daughters and regaling with anecdotes about their lives. Though it felt like it must be getting quite late, in actual fact the sun had still been setting before six o’clock, and the two been enjoying each other’s company for a decent length of time considering the early hours of their shift at the hospital.

Gavin was a bit jealous to learn of all the exotic places Claire had lived throughout her life. In particular, he thought it must have been quite romantic to spend a year in Paris, where he and Mary had honeymooned back in ‘49. He’d never been outside of Edinburgh for more than a few weeks at a time, with the exception of his Air Force years. But despite a bit of vicarious thrill at her travels, he wondered if she didn’t feel like a bit of a vagabond, without the comforting constancy of neighbors who’d known you since you were wee, a community to support you when you were in need, and a loving extended family.

They spoke of their medical careers, boasting about various professional accomplishments and gossiping about colleagues that the other might never meet. On one topic, both stayed mum, neither wishing to invoke the names of their spouses. Certainly they were party to the memories they recounted, but each kept their own significant person sacred, compartmentalized from the unfolding intimacy that they were sharing in conversation with each other.

After settling the bill, Gavin followed Claire out to the sidewalk, where they began to stroll back towards where she’d parked the car, taking their time in reaching the destination. Would he ask her to favor him with a ride back to his hotel? Would he shake her hand and tell her to enjoy her day off? Would she demur, and suggest that they put off the awkwardness of parting by stopping somewhere else for a nightcap?

As Claire approached a crosswalk, she suddenly stopped stock still in her tracks. A familiar figure had caught her eye walking a ways ahead on the other side of the street. Without a doubt, she saw Frank, with his scholarly tweed jacket and a debonair hat tipped low over his forehead. He had his arm around a slight blonde woman who leaned against him with an easy comfort, as if she’d been built to measure so as to fit just right in the space beside him.

Startled, Claire made a sharp ninety degree turn on her heel and popped into the brick alleyway between the restaurant and the adjacent newsstand. As she hid from the possibility that Frank might see her, or that she might have to see more of him with his girlfriend, Gavin stood puzzled, shifting his glance toward the direction where Claire had been momentarily staring. Cautiously, he slid into the alley just after her, and screwed his expression in wordless question. Claire met his gaze, but felt a swell of embarrassment at acknowledging to anyone other than Joe that she didn’t have the perfect _Ozzie and Harriet_ family life.

“We lead separate lives,” she admitted. “It’s best… for Brianna,” Claire continued, but stopped at the frown that drew Gavin’s eyebrows together. He felt sorry for her then, this accomplished, fascinating, stunning woman whose husband carried that title in name only, if not in duty. He felt a pang, remembering the tone of her voice when she’d said, “I love you,” earlier on the phone to her daughter.

He stepped closer to her, overcome by an urge to wrap her in his arms and hold her against his chest. He was accustomed to healing people by means of violence, cutting and stitching together damaged organs so that his patients could go on to live long and happy lives. But in this moment, he wished he had the credentials to fix a broken heart, and wondered if he could mend Claire’s by sheer force of will.

“Ye dinna have to explain yourself to me, Claire,” he said softly, his voice laden with sympathy. “I’m no’ asking anything of you.”

Claire closed her eyes as if she wouldn’t have the courage to control her movements with them still open. Tentatively, she reached a hand toward Gavin and placed it delicately on his chest, taking the lapel of his jacket in her grasp. “I wish you would,” she admitted, in hardly more than a whisper.

She felt dizzy, stars swimming behind her eyelids as she stood with her back against the brick wall and her fingers connecting her to this man, this stranger who seemed to have entered her life just when she needed it. A voice in her mind posed the question: ‘What is it you want, Beauchamp?’

In all honesty, she didn’t know. She didn’t want to be unfaithful, to Jamie or to Frank, really. But the strength of her pulse told her the truth as well that she didn’t want to be unfaithful to herself, either. ‘You deserve to be happy,’ Joe had said. Could that be true? Could she want as much for herself as she would want for anyone else about whom she felt affection?

Her body knew far better than her mind what it wanted, and she tipped her chin up toward Gavin, her eyes still shut as her cheeks bloomed with feeling. He rested his hand on her upper arm and bent close to her face. She felt the warmth of him approaching her and parted her lips in anticipation.

“I’m no’ staying, Claire,” Gavin spoke, guiltily. He wanted her, and the thought that she might want him, too—but what could he offer her? Despite her loveliness, his decision to decline the job offer hadn’t changed.

Claire gulped, wondering if perhaps the kiss she was bracing herself for might never come. “I know,” she said plainly.

Gavin continued, his face still mere inches away from hers. “It can only be now,” he said, not wanting to mislead her. “I have a life in Scotland.”

“I know,” Claire repeated. Her grip on his lapel firmed, an urgency making her tremble as she tried not to lose her nerve.

"God help me," Gavin breathed, then pressed his lips against Claire's just as she lost the steadiness in her knees and fell into his embrace.


	9. Blind with Need

Claire’s eyelids fluttered as Gavin kissed her, more gently than she would have hoped. His touch was tinged with a caution that, in a younger man, could have been described as timidness. But in Gavin, it spoke of restraint—the measured intensity of a man who had not touched a woman in many years. He moved his hand to cup Claire’s face, and a single tear rolled down her cheek. With a brush of his fingertip, he wiped it away, then touched his lips to the spot just beside her mouth where it had left its salty shadow.

Her body relaxing, Claire lifted her arms to wrap around Gavin’s neck, allowing his frame to assist her in holding herself upright. He encircled his arms around her waist, pulling her close to him with hands that asked a question her body answered. Their mouths opened slightly so that their tongues could meet, alternately pressing and yielding against each other. Eventually, the kiss dissolved, as they stood breathing the same air, Gavin leaning his forehead against Claire’s. He could feel the shapes of her body held against him, her breasts and waist and hips an unfamiliar terrain that he wanted desperately to explore.

Gavin began a sentence but couldn’t begin to predict how he would end it. “I think we should…”

Say goodnight? Run away together? Tear each other’s clothes off right here in this damned alleyway? Claire met him at his predicate. “I think we should, too.”

They drove in silence. Claire turned on the radio but didn’t hear whatever music the disc jockey was spinning. Conversation had been easy between them, but the car ride didn’t feel awkward, despite the quiet. There just wasn’t any communication that either of them needed to have right now that could be done with words. As they pulled up to the hotel entrance, a valet approached the driver’s side door, and opened it for Claire. She stepped out while Gavin gathered his briefcase and the brown paper envelope from the record store.

They strode through the well-appointed lobby smiling politely at employees whose hospitable greetings felt like an intrusion. After requesting his floor of the elevator operator, Gavin and Claire stood side-by-side on the interminable ride up a dozen stories. They hadn’t touched since parting ways in the alley and returning to Claire’s car. Both knew that if they so much as accidentally brushed against each other’s sleeve, they’d be powerless to stop the urge they each had to be consumed by lust.

Gavin let Claire walk into the hotel suite before him after he unlocked the door, and she made a quick survey, casting her gaze around the room. “Impressive,” she said, breaking the détente.

“Would ye care for a drink?” Gavin wished that there were finer options in the hotel minibar. But at this moment he’d offer her moonshine if it were all he could come by. He removed his jacket and hung it on the coat rack.

“Please,” Claire accepted. “I’m going to, erm, powder my nose.”

She stepped into the ensuite and ran her fingers through her hair. It wasn’t the first time she’d been unsure if she was awake or in a dream, but she placed her hands upon the cold marble vanity and it felt solid underneath them. She splashed a bit of cold water on the back of her neck, and breathed deeply: in for a count of four, out for a count of four.

Gavin emptied the small bottle of whisky (a blend—’Och, it’ll haveta do’) into the crystal tumblers by the bar. There was a bit extra left in the bottle, which he tossed back before disposing of it. He slid one of the records he’d purchased out of the sleeve, and set it on the turntable to play. From the bathroom, Claire could hear the plaintive melody of a trumpet, and it beckoned her out of her private reverie, a siren’s call that would lead her either to ecstasy, or to shipwreck against the rocks.

Gavin handed her a glass, and held his aloft in one hand as he slid the other around Claire’s waist. They swayed to the instrumental ambience, partly dancing, partly drinking, and partly watching each other as the truth of what they were about to do made itself evident. The dulcet tones of the music surrendered to Louis Armstrong’s rich vocals.

 _Hold me close and hold me fast_  
_The magic spell you cast_  
_This is la vie en rose_

The spell thus invoked, Gavin tossed aside what remained of his inhibitions, and sent Claire’s with them. He stooped to kiss her again, this time deeply, as if he would force the sorrow he carried into submission with the strength of it. Without detaching from her, he set their glasses back onto the bar, and slid his hands over and around Claire’s body, tracing over the curve of her backside and squeezing her soft flesh through the layers of her clothes.

A breathless groan escaped Claire’s lips as he touched her, each point of contact a flint igniting a spark, the blood pumping through her veins a trail of gunpowder carrying a flame to a forgotten place deep within her. She stood on tiptoe to reach for him as they kissed, her heels slipping out of her shoes as she found her footing. They moved in a slow amble with no destination in particular, until bumping against the sitting room’s armchair. Entangled, they fell into it, Gavin slumped back with Claire awkwardly folded against him.

He paused for only a moment as she situated herself, her skirt sliding up her thighs as she planted both knees on either side of his hips. Gavin ran his hands up the smooth length of her legs, past the hem of her skirt, to where her silk stockings ended and the naked skin of her thighs was exposed to the air. Claire reached up between them and tugged on his necktie, undoing the slender knot and tossing it aside. Gavin felt at the back of Claire’s waist and unzipped her skirt, pulling it over her body as she reached her arms up above her head.

She sat facing him in her blouse and garter belt, and he reveled in the various textures of her, smooth fabrics over soft skin. Her dextrous surgeon’s fingers nimbly unbuttoned his shirt, though he had to pull at it himself to get it over his arms and out from his waistband. In attempting this maneuver, he leaned forward, almost upsetting Claire’s balance and losing her from her perch on his lap. He swiftly caught her, and bent forward, one hand supporting her weight and the other clutching the luxurious mane of her hair. Gathering her to him, he stood, carrying her against him to the bed, where he laid her down and stood above her, kicking his shoes off and undoing his belt.

Now he was on top of her, spreading apart her legs with a nudge of his knee, and bending to kiss along her jawline and down her neck. Claire ran her hands over his well-coiffed hair, delighted by the look of its red-brown color underneath her fingers. Gavin pulled Claire’s blouse up and began kissing the alabaster skin of her ribcage, his day’s-end stubble lightly tickling Claire as she helped to free herself of the fabric. She then succeeded in pulling his undershirt off, and looked excitedly up at his torso, hovering above her.

He was solidly built, with a heft to him but lacking Frank’s sinew or Jamie’s definition. He had a broad chest and shoulders, his arms and chest dusted with a generous layer of auburn fuzz. She ran her fingertips over his strong doctor’s forearms, investigating his scar but not with any more scrutiny than she was paying to the freckles that dotted his arms and shoulders. Gavin held himself up with one hand and undid his trousers with the other, working to pull his socks off his feet as he rid himself of his pants as well. Claire tightened her legs against his, besotted by the sensation of his thick, long legs, their coarse hair in stark contrast to the slickness of her stockings.

Gavin reached his hand down inquiringly, cupping his palm between Claire’s legs and applying pressure to the sensitive zone. She squirmed underneath him, her body hot and wanting. He hardened, his erection evident against her through the fabric of his trunks. Claire crossed her legs around his body and used her hips to shove Gavin onto his back. She could wait no longer to have a man’s touch satisfy her need. Various cravings all called out, each more urgent than the others.

She unfastened her brassiere and cast it aside, letting her breasts settle heavily, her nipples rising in stiff peaks upon being exposed. Gavin’s cock twitched underneath her, and she rocked her hips forward, pressing her hungry body against his. His hands rose to meet her body, feeling the weight of her tits and roughly rubbing his thumbs over and around her spectacular pink areolae. Claire vocalized then, a thirsty moan that expressed years of solitude, and sensations remembered.

Her voice unlocked something in Gavin, his body controlled by the ghost of his younger self, suddenly impelled to use Claire’s body as a balm to coat his wounds. He pulled her breasts toward himself and feasted on them, sucking and licking and leaving small bites on her delicate skin. Claire shivered in his grasp, and he took advantage of her vulnerability to push her back onto the bed and bear down upon her, his body dwarfing hers as she succumbed to his desire.

He reached his fingers into the waistband of her garter belt and didn’t tarry to bother with undoing it. In a few rough movements he tugged it down over her hips and pulled it off of her body, taking her panties and stockings with it. Now she was naked beneath him, and he drank her in with his eyes. The dark hair at the center of her was foreign to him, his body remembering the fair golden coloring of his towheaded wife, but delighting in the mahogany tones of Claire, laid out before him. He could smell her animal aroma, mingling a bit with the herbal perfume she wore, and he groaned with hunger.

Gavin’s mind raced in a dozen directions, his hands, his mouth, and his cock all wanting and neither able to decide what to do next. He was intoxicated by her scent and wanted desperately to taste her, to drive his tongue deep between her legs and feast. But part of him felt that if he didn’t sheathe his cock within her immediately, he would be destroyed, splintering into a thousand pieces. He wanted to ride her, he wanted her on top of him, he wanted to use her mouth to bring his pleasure, he wanted to abstain from his own needs and service her, bringing her to come over and over again until she was ruined.

Claire spread her legs and explored Gavin’s chest and smooth, unblemished back with her hands as she kissed him, and ran her tongue up the length of his neck, taking his earlobe between her lips and sucking. He tasted salty and definitively male, and her stomach tightened as she recalled with perfect clarity the distinct flavor of Jamie’s skin, its grassy undertones and beastly masculinity, heightened when he had been fighting, or woody with drink when he was in his cups.

She moaned as Gavin’s fingers separated the folds of her sex and searched her, testing her readiness and finding wet welcome. She shivered a bit at the pinch of being probed for the first time in years, but was so slick with want that he could easily send two fingers into her, all the way to the knuckle. A high-pitched “ah!” escaped Claire’s throat, and Gavin tore his trunks away, kicking them off to free his swollen cock that bobbed against the velvet skin of Claire’s thigh. It was now.

“I must,” Gavin croaked, and Claire closed her legs around him, pulling his hips toward hers. “Please,” she panted, a parched wanderer in the desert desperate for drink, but willing to settle for the fool’s gold of an oasis.

He drove himself into her in one firm stroke, and they both cried out, feeling not unlike virgins discovering the knowledge of their bodies after years of celibacy. He was still inside her for a long, slow moment, sure he’d lose himself with the subtlest motion. Claire’s body adjusted around the intrusion, the shock of pain giving over to the warm familiarity of being taken. Inquisitively, she squeezed around him, flexing muscles she might have thought had atrophied, and the movement stirred him, encouraging him to rock his weight against her, the thickness of him creating space inside Claire’s body where only loneliness had been in residence.

She pulled him close, her hands digging into the muscles of his buttocks as she lifted her knees higher. She wanted him to serve her, to apply these steady ministrations for hours without end. But she also wanted him to cleave her in two, and fuck her out of her misery. Ultimately, what she or Gavin wanted would have to wait, his primal instinct asserting itself as the first master to be satisfied tonight. He thrust himself into her hard, over and over, his body independent of his mind. At last he had only the presence of self to acknowledge, in apology, “I’ll no’ last,” as his balls tightened against his body and he stroked within her.

Unable to form a coherent response, Claire only tightened her pelvic floor, seeking to milk him with her need. With a choked groan, he lost himself, pouring into her and collapsing, his sweaty, hairy chest pressed flat against her panting breasts. His body pulsed as it drained itself, and Gavin made several desperate noises into her hair as he was spent. His synapses fired off a volley of conflicting signals. A sense of victory was dominant, but he also felt a twinge of guilt at not being able to restrain himself until Claire had her satisfaction. An echo of hunger still unfulfilled, and wanting to continue fucking this willing creature despite his body’s inability to so much as breathe. A wisp of sorrow at the feeling of being consumed by a woman who was hardly more than a stranger, and not the person with whom he imagined he’d grow old and die alongside. And a massive sigh of relief at joining with another, a return to humanity he hadn’t thought was possible.

Claire felt suddenly weepy, but not strictly out of sadness. In truth she was simply overwhelmed, her body, her mind, and her spirit all seeking to express themselves. The shock of penetration left her feeling exhausted, while a simultaneous hunger for her own as-yet undelivered orgasm stoked a fire in her belly that fueled her desire for more. Her skin felt aglow with joy at having been given a reminder of what it was designed for, but there was also a hollow deep in her soul that could not be filled by anyone but _him_. She missed Jamie desperately, but she also felt so gratefully affectionate toward this man she held in her arms. He had given her a rare gift, and she intended to receive it more than the once.


	10. Pillow Talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to @JudyC1955 for suggesting a bit of "after glow!"

Claire winced slightly as Gavin eased himself out of her, and he slowed, noticing a tiny trail of blood on her skin where they were joined. He felt undignified at having hurt her with his passion, and Claire blushed with a bit of embarrassment. She wasn’t surprised to see that her body was unaccustomed to receiving a man, after years without practice. “It’s been… quite a long time,” she explained, quietly.

He felt fiercely protective of her in this moment, and caressed her hip with his fingertips. In a strong voice, he declared, “Virescit vulnere virtus.”

Claire puzzled a moment over the Latin. “Courage…?”

“Courage grows strong at a wound,” he translated, then gently kissed Claire on the forehead. “The Stewart motto.”

She chuckled, thinking fondly about Scots and their traditions. Gavin wondered about Claire’s own background, “Tell me, Dr. Randall, what was yer maiden name?”

“Beauchamp,” she said, to an appraising expression from Gavin.

“Beauchamp,” he repeated. “It’s… verra dainty.”

Claire laughed, unsure whether or not that was meant as a compliment. “When I was married before, in Scotland,” she paused for a moment, “I was a Fraser.”

“A Highlander, eh?” Gavin was impressed. Claire thought for a moment, wondering how much was appropriate to share with this man. But then, she realized the freedom in opening up to someone with whom she had no intention of sustaining a relationship. In truth, she had nothing to lose. For the first time in someone else’s company, since she last saw Mrs. Graham at Reverend Wakefield’s house all those years ago, Claire invoked him, saying the name out loud.

“Jamie.”

Gavin could feel a world of difference in Claire’s energy between how she held herself when uttering her late husband’s name, versus how she had tensed when she’d seen the Professor earlier in the evening. He recognized the mood she was emanating; it was how he felt when he thought of Mary. “Ye lost him a verra long time ago?” he asked, genuinely curious.

“Yes,” Claire said plainly, then surprised even herself with what she admitted next. “We lost a daughter, as well. Stillborn. I like to think that he’s watching over her, holding her in his arms among the angels, as he never got to while he lived.”

Gavin uttered a silent prayer for Claire’s child. “And now you have Brianna,” he offered, wishing to acknowledge what she had, as well as what she’d lost.

Claire smiled warmly. “Yes. She’s the most important part of my life. My treasure.”

Gavin understood completely. “Iona was so young. Barely eight years old when we lost Mary.” Claire waited, wanting to offer him the same space to speak of his loss that he had given her. “Even still,” he continued, “sometimes when I look at her I can see her mum living through her. In the way she carries herself, now that she’s a young woman. The way she invents wee tunes, singin’ to herself while she doesna think anyone is listening. Just the spit of her.”

They held a private vigil then, laying close in silence for a time. Claire reached across Gavin to run her fingers across the length of his left arm, a wide band of scar tissue intermittently interrupted with patches of whitish-pink skin that slightly resembled a plucked chicken. She could read a scar as easily as the written word. “This has been healed a long time,” she said more in inquiry than in assessment.

“Aye, nearly twenty years,” he agreed. “This bonny thing earned me my retirement. Several grafts. Months of physio.” These were painful memories, but still, “I was lucky.”

Claire knew what that meant coming from the mouth of a survivor. “Others weren’t,” she said somberly. Gavin nodded. “Aye.”

“Jamie was a soldier,” Claire remembered. “It was in his bones. And on his skin. I stitched him up myself more than a few times.”

Her fingers were gentle on the mangled skin of his forearm. “I canna imagine he could have asked for a better doctor,” Gavin said honestly. He held her hand to his mouth and kissed the tips of her fingers and the palm of her healer's hand. How many lives had she saved with her skillfull touch? He noticed a faint, barely visible white scar of her own, just across her wrist.

“This doctor is parched,” Claire quipped, and stretched her legs out over the side of the bed. She walked to fill her whisky glass from earlier with water from the bathroom sink. He watched her as she strode away from him, naked, the soft creases at her waist and the round, pert globes of her arse. After she reentered the room, refreshed and rehydrated, Gavin called to her from beneath the bedclothes.

“Come back here,” he purred. “I’m no’ finished wi’ you yet…”


	11. Second Course

Gavin sat up on the edge of the bed and gathered Claire into his arms as she stood before him. He was so tall that, seated, he could have easy access to her body as she leaned against him. She rested her hands on his freckled shoulders and looked down at him as he nestled his face between her breasts, feeling their soft give against the hard lines of his jaw and cheekbones. He rubbed his sandpaper stubble against her skin, as delicate as silk. Smelling her and touching her, he felt like an adventurer setting sail to discover new worlds.

“What is it ye like?” He growled the question from against her chest.

“Goodness,” Claire said softly. “I could hardly remember…”

Gavin placed his mouth around her nipple, his tongue rubbing against it as he tugged at her gently with the pressure of his kiss. Claire let out a sigh. “D’ye like that?”

“That’s good,” she said breathlessly.

Suddenly he gripped her other breast in his hand, roughly pulling it towards him and taking that nipple between his teeth, devouring her like a delicacy. “What about that?”

Claire moaned, “That’s better…”

Gavin ran one hand down her back and around the swell of her behind. He reached beneath her thigh and pulled it up, resting her knee against the mattress as he held her other leg between his. Continuing his ministrations on her breasts, he slid his hand between her legs and back and forth down the length of her opening. He wet the pad of his finger with her own juices before insistently making circles over and around her clitoris.

Claire bucked suddenly against him, gripping her hands into his hair in order to keep her balance. “Ye like that?”

She simply groaned. Gavin’s thumb joined his other finger, and he pinched the bundle of nerves, not sharply, but with an insistent pressure.

“Oh!” Claire’s body vibrated with a jolt of sensation that rocked her. “Tell me,” Gavin beckoned.

“I like that,” she panted.

“What do ye like?” He was determined to hear her voice her desires.

Claire’s voice came out huskily, “I like it when you grab me.”

He reached two fingers up inside her then, but kept his thumb working in small circles on her mound. He, too, had the dexterity of an experienced surgeon, and didn’t struggle at all to maintain a ‘come hither’ gesture against the squishy bundle of nerves inside her, while rubbing her outside rhythmically. Claire’s legs began to tremble, and though she rested all of her weight on him, she was completely losing her center of gravity. She began making desperate, ‘mmm, mmmh’ noises, and rocked her body against his right hand while his left held her stable from behind.

Gavin withdrew his fingers and leaned back onto the pillow, pulling Claire on top of him as he adjusted his position. He urged her forward with his hands on her hips, settling himself as she crawled above him, until her knees were on either side of his shoulders and she was braced against the headboard, leaning on it with her forehead and elbows. He reached his arms up and hooked his hands around the tops of her thighs from underneath and between them, maintaining control of her hips while all she had to do was hold herself upright.

Smoothly, he pulled her body down, until he could meet her with his tongue. Her scent was intoxicating, and she tasted like nectar. Nodding his head up and down, he traced the lines and folds and dips of her anatomy with the tip of his tongue, then with broad, flat strokes, and occasionally offering other textural curiosities like his solid chin and prickly facial hair. Claire’s hips swayed, and she began speeding up her movements as she ground her body swiftly against Gavin’s mouth. With his arms locked around her legs he controlled the depth with which she kneeled over him, alternately creating distance and holding her tight to him.

The record had long since stopped spinning, and the only soundtrack to their activity was the creak of the bed frame and the slick, wet noises of their joining. Claire began to forget herself, and made small whimpering noises to the tempo of Gavin’s actions. He formed a vacuum with his lips and sucked her epicenter of pleasure into his mouth, pulling against her while making rapid flicking motions against it with the tip of his tongue. Claire’s sounds grew louder as he brought her closer and closer to the edge of release, and she gripped her fingers into the headboard while her pelvis rocked back and forth.

Her staccato noises began to blend into one long, low, “oooooooh,” its pitch and vibrato modulating unpredictably. Gavin could sense that she was nearly at her climax, and he carefully used his teeth, just a little, as he pleasured her. Finally, she cried out in assent as she bore down against him. “Yes!”

He looked up at the marvelous perspective of her body towering above him as he steeled himself, breathing through his nose when he could; Claire’s movements becoming more reckless as she worked with him from atop her throne. Suddenly, she arched her back and cried out, slapping one hand against the wall as she shuddered, her orgasm coursing through her nervous system.

“Ah!” she exclaimed, lifting her body higher as the intensity subsided. She weakly adjusted her legs as she sank to her side next to Gavin, ravenously delighted by the sheen of sweat that shone on his ruddy face. She pulled him to her for a kiss, yearning to taste her pleasure on his lips, probing his mouth with her tongue as vestigial reverberations shivered throughout her body.

“Claire,” Gavin beckoned. “Do ye like it when I do that?”

“Oh yes,” she replied, without a shred of self-consciousness. “I like that just fine.”

The satisfaction that was evident in her voice aroused his sense of pride, and Claire felt his penis stiffen against the curve of her hip. She reached one hand down to grasp him. “And _that_ ,” she said, in between kisses, “I like very much indeed.”


	12. Afterglow

Claire languidly stroked Gavin, and he leaned back with a sigh of relaxation as she gripped and maneuvered his hardening cock. She drank him in with her eyes as he laid beside her. In some ways it was innate, the knowledge of what to do with a man’s body at her disposal. In other ways, he felt foreign, strange and new and with his own individual peculiarities.

His pubic hair was more brown than the reddish coloring of the rest of him, and his skin was pale, not dissimilar from hers. He had the long limbs and torso that reminded her of Jamie, but he did not have the bronze of a man that spent much time outdoors, and he was broad and stocky, but well-proportioned for his height. His cock was solid in her fist, and she threw one leg over to straddle him. He opened his eyes at this, and ran his hands up her body as she settled herself.

Keeping a firm grasp on him, she slid his foreskin smoothly up and down, then pressed the length of him against herself, wetting his flesh with her own slickness as she readied them both for her penetration. She raised up then, and slowly lowered herself onto him, sheathing his member in three progressively deeper strokes. She made a low noise in her throat as her muscles, limber from the release of her orgasm, relaxed around him. He bent his legs slightly to gain some leverage, and held firm to her waist as he moved his hips against hers, slowly.

Claire was present in the moment, but not entirely. She threw her head back and closed her eyes, her mind calling upon her body’s many memories from years gone by. She could almost imagine that she was back in France, or Leoch, or somewhere in a dewy field among the heather, Jamie’s strong desire possessing her, time and time again, as he discovered the carnal pleasures of their union. She touched herself, running her palms over her own thighs, belly, and neck, and smoothing her hair away from her face. She felt as though her hands were Jamie’s hands, cupping her breasts and pulling tenderly at her nipples, possessed by his spirit across the transom of two hundred years.

Gavin wordlessly called to her, his body flexing beneath hers, a strong thrust returning Claire to the present. She cooed as tension built deep inside her, and she leaned back slightly, pressing her hands down upon Gavin’s thighs for support as she ground her pelvis in aggressive figure-eights. He reached his hand up and held her by the top of her shoulder, keeping her still and tugging at the hair at the nape of her neck. The side of his hand caressed her jawline and she leaned her face into the affectionate gesture. He parted her lips to stick his thumb inside her mouth, and she accepted it, sucking and wetting the invading digit.

Withdrawing his hand, he moved the thumb down to investigate where she was taking him, worrying the skin around her clitoris as she increased the speed with which she rode him. She was much closer to completion now, having been so thoroughly primed by his explorations with his mouth, and she dug her fingernails into his flesh as she let herself continue to be wound up like a top. A few more insistent movements and she was coming, once more, moaning in pleasure as she bucked on top of him. She toppled forward with the last of her tremors, chest against him and hair splayed wildly around his face.

As the writhing woman on top of him caught her breath, Gavin's cock throbbed inside her, slowly anticipating its own repeat performance. He slipped his hands down to spread her arse open and grab her upper thighs, holding Claire tight to himself. In an ungraceful but swift motion, he rolled over her, his knees bent wide and pressing her legs apart. She was putty in his hands as her orgasm subsided, and she provided no resistance when he pinned one of her legs high up against herself so that he could bear down on her, thrusting himself into her depths as far as possible.

His body was ready to enjoy again the surrender of release, and he grunted as he rhythmically fucked her like a piston. He bent low and kissed her, hard, his lips and tongue meeting hers in a hungry dance while he continued working himself in and out of her. She squeaked a little as he took her, and he began once more to lose his ability to control the fierceness with which he would have his pleasure. He felt giddy, like a lad with extra tickets for rides at the carnival, delighted to finally have a woman with whom he wanted to lose himself, after so many years of building a wall around the possibility.

With a final thrust he plunged all the way forward and erupted, moaning with jubilation into the duvet, over Claire’s shoulder. They stayed joined for a while, this time, both too weak to separate until their pulses slowed and the dizziness in their heads abated. “Christ,” Gavin admitted, eventually, “I didna think I still had it.”

They both laughed at the ridiculous honesty of that statement. “Oh, you’ve got it, alright,” Claire promised him, herself wondering if she’d ever be able to walk again.

Flopped next to each other now, Gavin reached out and took Claire’s hand, holding it gently so as to maintain contact while their bodies individually returned to normal. They exchanged sweet utterances of encouragement and satisfaction as the adrenaline flowing through their systems diminished, and they began to feel comfortable, the thrill of exertion giving way to a need for rest and comfort.

Gavin fell asleep, maintaining a loose grasp of Claire’s hand. She looked over at him and smiled, feeling sated as if she’d broken a decade-long fast. She glanced around the suite and puzzled for a moment, trying to decide if she’d be better off walking past all of the hotel staff alone, in the wee hours of the morning, or later tomorrow, still on the arm of this man who was not her husband. She gently got up and began dressing, gathering her belongings and deciding that she’d prefer to wake up tomorrow in the comfort of her own bed. Before she departed, she quietly pulled the bed sheet up to Gavin’s chest, then tiptoed out of the room, pulling the door softly shut behind her, and waiting to put on her shoes until she stood in the carpeted hallway.

When Gavin awoke the next morning to a room filled with sunlight streaming in the window, he rolled onto his side as the sleep still partially clouded his vision. He felt spent, and as his synapses began to fire for the day, his body remembered the sensory satisfaction he’d had for hours with a beautiful woman in his bed. He reached a hand forward and opened his eyes, expecting to see Mary sleeping soundly to his right. Alas no, the bed was empty, but for himself. It wasn’t uncommon for his first cogent thought upon waking to be a disappointing realization of the loss of her, but it felt slightly muffled now, like a wound that ached, but did not bleed, having—at least temporarily—been bandaged.

Looking up, a glint of metal caught his eye, and he leaned over to take a closer look at the foreign object on the nightstand. Claire had left her earrings, a pair of yellow gold hoops, on top of a folded slip of paper with her phone number written in a refined hand. Gavin smiled, satisfied that while Claire had her own reasons to have left him as he slept, she clearly wanted to see him again. The question was, how long could he wait before dialing her and having her naked once again at his mercy?


	13. With the Proper Stranger

Claire awoke quite late on Saturday, her body aching from the previous night’s exertion. She stretched under the covers, feeling both sore and simmering. The sound of Frank’s quiet snoring from his bed on the other side of the room alerted her to his presence. He’d have gotten home even later than she had, and by the tempo of his breathing she could tell that he was in a deep slumber.

She couldn’t have predicted how she might feel to face Frank after straying physically for the first time since she returned to him. She’d been unfaithful before, of course, her heart never truly his again, and she’d agreed to give him his freedom within the legal boundaries of their marriage many years since. It might have been natural for her to feel frightened, nervous, or guilty, but she really didn’t. She felt, in some ways, immune.

For years she had lived as a shell of herself as Frank continued his own personal growth, and Claire felt no worry that she would be caught out and have to face the consequences. After all, she wasn’t in love with Gavin. That would have been the more dangerous threat to her fidelity, and her heart would never stray from the bond she shared with Jamie, even across the boundary between life and death. What had happened last night was just an episode in the decades she’d shared with Frank. An episode, she hoped, that had a bit more gas in the tank, but with an expiration date that meant she didn’t have to worry about it overly complicating what was most important to her: the well-being of her daughter, and the professional accomplishments toward which she was still working as an attending trauma surgeon at the hospital.

Claire sat at the kitchen window enjoying the noontime sun and ameliorating her fatigue with another cup of coffee. She had her sketchbook out and was working on some diagrams from memory of recent things she’d seen in the operating room and wanted to commit to record. She’d been practicing a new suture stitch recently and copied its pattern around the border of her page before shading in a particularly tricky cross-section of the gallbladder that she’d been working on.

Frank eventually stepped into the kitchen to join her for a bit of a late breakfast. They exchanged genial morning greetings and he sat beside her to read the newspaper while his bread toasted and his tea steeped. Claire felt a bit of a flutter in her stomach that could hardly be avoided—as anyone would, holding a secret. Aside from a few pleasantries about their weeks at work, the couple sat in oddly harmonious quiet, strangers more than spouses.

As Frank was standing at the counter spreading marmalade on his toast, the telephone rang, and he casually made to answer. Claire tensed, wondering what horned devil of arousal had possessed her to leave Gavin with her phone number. Frank waited a beat upon answering, then repeated, “Hello?” He hung up the handset. “No one there,” he explained casually, thinking nothing of it before returning to his seat across from Claire.

Blood rushed to her cheeks as she shifted her attention back to her sketchbook, focusing intently on one area of illustration. The ring of the telephone had acted upon her like a Pavlovian bell, and she squeezed her legs together tightly as the memory of someone on the other end of the line, wanting _her_ , sent goosebumps over her skin. Frank was absorbed in the day’s newspaper, and seemed to have no awareness of the private fireworks that were going off in his wife’s body, just feet away from him.

A sardonic thought entered Claire’s mind. She imagined how the reaction to a suspicious caller and even subtle responsive cues from herself would be the complete opposite of Frank’s disinterest, if it were Jamie sitting beside her. No, his violent rage would control him, and if he didn’t assert his mastery of Claire to the sorry soul who’d tempted her, he’d certainly wield it with her, bringing her to heel until she begged to be possessed by him.

She fingered the silver ring on her right hand as a white-hot memory of the day Jamie gave it to her flooded her mind. He had beaten her, and she had shut him out, and in the confusion of returning from Jack Randall’s clutches to the unpredictable society of the MacKenzies at Castle Leoch, she and Jamie had bitterly accused each other of wanting to live apart. He had offered her this token of their marital commitment, and she had accepted it. But he would not be satisfied with only that, and had taken her promise to be his at its word, pinning her easily to their bed as he bound her wrists in his hands and claimed her body roughly and resolutely.

This train of thought wasn’t helping to keep Claire’s arousal at bay. She finished her coffee, then excused herself to run an errand. She drove a few blocks to the nearest grocery store, where there was a bank of telephones. Fishing in her purse for a nickel and the matchbook she’d pinched from Gavin’s hotel, she dialed the number on the cardboard and asked the operator to connect her to his room. “This is Dr. Stewart,” Gavin answered cautiously.

“It’s Claire.”

“Claire,” he sounded relieved. “I heard his voice and thought it best to…”

Embarrassed, she interrupted him, “I don’t know what I was thinking. I suppose I wasn’t expecting him to be at home; he rarely is. I’m glad you called.”

“I’m glad ye called back.” They listened to each other breathe across the telephone like a pair of randy teenagers.

“I don’t have any plans today—”

“It’s my one day off while I’m here—”

They spoke over each other. Randy teenagers. Gavin asserted his voice. “I wonder if ye’d be so kind as to join me for a drive? I’m at the hospital every other day until I return, and wouldna mind seeing a bit of the… scenery?”

In truth, Gavin wanted to ask Claire to come back to his hotel room in only a coat, and spend the next eighteen or so hours naked in his bed before they were both due back at work. But he was a gentleman, after all, and thought an unsubtle proposition like that was not befitting of a woman such as Claire, regardless of what they’d found themselves doing to each other the night before.

Claire looked down and realized that she’d left the house in enough of a hurry that she wasn’t quite dressed to impress. Casual, in a pair of pedal-pushing cigarette pants, an oversized boatneck sweater, and a comfortable pair of lace-up Keds, she hoped he wouldn’t find the mystery of the married doctor with the fine fashion sense a bit deflated. “I’m a touch underdressed for any formal outings. A bit of a drive would be just fine, though.”

She pulled up to the hotel after tying a scarf around her neck and rouging her cheeks with a bit of lipstick, hoping to have elevated her ensemble to something a bit more chic. She hardly recognized Gavin, standing by the entrance, half-expecting to see him in the suit he’d worn to work the past couple of days. For a moment she thought it could have been Steve McQueen, ginger hair keenly slicked to one side, a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses on, and a shawl-collared sweater looking refined over a simple T-shirt. The look was completed with pleated khaki slacks and brown suede shoes, one ankle crossed casually over the other.

Gavin hoped he looked _cool_ , having waited for an awkwardly long period of time while attempting to affect an air of suavity under the snickering gaze of the valet and porter staff. Claire lowered the power window as he approached her car. “Your chariot, Doctor,” she said with a smirk, and he slid in beside her. He leaned in for a kiss, but then hesitated, unsure if that was too familiar, especially out in public. He settled upon touching her cheek, gently, then tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. She smiled and bit her lip nervously.

“Where to?” she asked, not really caring where they went as long as they might have a bit of privacy once they got there. Gavin thought for a second, then offered, sheepishly, “Ye’ll think I’m a simple tourist, but I wouldna mind seein’ the notorious Salem, where they put the witches on trial?”

Claire frowned, and replied with a firm, “No.”

Not wanting to get into her personal anguish over the site of the witchcraft delusion, she offered an alternative. “But, we can soak in a bit of history. It’s only about a half-hour to Concord.”

They drove off like teenagers in daddy’s T-bird, looking forward to a bit of adventure.


	14. Lather, Rinse, Repeat

After a pleasant drive inland, Claire and Gavin stopped in a small-town grocery store to gather provisions for an impromptu picnic. The most important item went first into the cart Gavin carried: a six-pack of Rheingold, frosty from the cooler. Claire felt like a bit of an ambassador for the American Northeast, offering critiques and recommendations for the bizarre regional foods that Gavin hadn’t seen before. He seemed to want to try one of everything, and picked up Boston cream pie and apple cider donuts from the bakery section, along with packages of Necco wafers and Tollhouse cookies.

“You have quite the sweet tooth,” Claire observed, ever the physician.

Gavin defended himself: “I’m a growing lad! ...What kind of biscuits are these?”

“They’re ‘cookies,’ here,” Claire corrected him. “Fig newtons—not my favorite.” Gavin put some in the cart. Laden with snacks, beer, and deli sandwiches, they continued on to the banks of Walden Pond, where a number of picnic tables provided a lovely view of the clear, smooth surface of the lake. The weather still being a bit chilly (if not prohibitively so for the British constitutions of Gavin and Claire), there were almost no other visitors to be seen around the pastoral rest area.

As they enjoyed their late afternoon meal and shared observations of the quaint vista, Claire and Gavin felt an easy comfort in their friendly conversation. But there was a thrilling undercurrent of remembered sensations that underlies all interactions between people who have newly become intimate. With a churchkey, Claire opened up the last two of the beers, and they carried them along as they decided to take a strolling hike a ways from the water’s edge into the woods.

Piercing a bit of the sexual tension that had returned, Gavin took Claire’s hand in his, and their interlocking fingers sent a wave of warmth up each of their bodies. “D’ye ever miss it? Scotland? Or England, even?” Gavin couldn’t deny the beauty of this natural place, so close and yet so far from the city. But America did have a way of feeling just so odd to his European sensibilities. It went beyond the idiosyncrasies of chips versus crisps. It just… wasn’t his homeland, and lacked that feeling of connection that coursed through his veins in Scotland.

Of course, Claire missed her life in Scotland, but that wasn’t simply a longing for the rugged taiga. It was that her home had been where Jamie was, and ever since Culloden, she’d had to wander, untethered to time or place. Before she could answer, they had come upon a low wooden sign. She read it out loud: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

That seemed well enough to close the conversation about homesickness. Just beyond the sign had been placed an odd formation of nine stone pillars, about waist-high. Claire momentarily thought about Craigh na Dun, though this place had none of the sense of foreboding she’d felt there. An inscription in one of the stones identified the site as that of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin. They walked a bit further along the trail before finding a small clearing among the trees that provided a breathtaking view of the lake. The sky was a bit grey, but the water looked so tranquil, and they stood quietly, breathing in the forest air and hearing the music of birdsong and wind dancing through the trees.

Claire felt peaceful. It wasn’t common for her to have this sensation. She felt a bit sad, but also as if she could fill her lungs and breathe without being crushed under the weight of her sorrow, for once. “I think I could live, quite simply, in a place like this,” she said, daydreaming about a life in a remote cabin, with a garden to tend and a crackling fireplace. “Beautiful,” she observed.

But it was her that Gavin was watching, not the scenery. “Beautiful,” he agreed, then pulled her close for a kiss. It started sweetly enough, but within moments their hands were busy tugging on each other’s hair and sliding up and under each other’s sweaters. They kissed each other hungrily, as if after years of abstinence, they would now drown without the satisfaction of their physical need. Gavin pushed Claire back against the trunk of a tree and pressed into her, bending her leg up alongside himself and grinding the swollen front of himself between her legs. The feel of his arousal thrilled Claire, and she found herself reaching down to unbutton his pants. He groaned as she took him in her hand, and his mouth closed tightly on her neck, just above where her scarf was tied.

Claire spun Gavin around so that his back was up against the tree, and dropped to her knees, wanton with desire. He sprung free as she tugged the front of his pants open, and she closed her lips around his cock, tasting him and feeling the long-forgotten power of having a man vulnerable, his entire physical self at her mercy with his most sensitive organ in her mouth. He held his fingers tight in her hair and gasped at the feeling of her on him. But it wasn’t enough.

Gavin pulled himself out of Claire’s possession, then dropped to his knees alongside her. Leaning down, he tipped her back onto the ground and kissed her deeply, his fingers working to unbutton her pants and slide inside the fabric, where he found her hot and slippery. He thought he’d take her right there in the dirt, and grabbed her waistband as she started to shimmy out of her clothes. A light rain had begun to fall in the waning afternoon light, but they were mostly shielded from it by the cover of boughs canopying the clearing.

Suddenly, they heard voices. Peering up, Gavin could see a family having just approached the nearby cabin site. He met Claire’s eyes and they giggled, quickly buttoning up their trousers. Gavin helped Claire to her feet and they began to run through the trees and back in the direction of the car. They were just about to make it when the sky opened up, letting down cold rain that soaked them through just as Claire was fumbling for the keys to unlock the vehicle.

Once inside, they turned to each other again, kissing hotly as the rain beat a tattoo on the car roof and windshield. Claire was in the middle of scooting across the bench seat to sit on Gavin’s lap facing him, when they heard a sharp rap on the window. A muffled voice called from outside the car, “Alright kids, roll down the window,” said an authoritative figure.

Gavin pressed the switch on the car door to comply, and the park ranger had to suppress a grin when he realized that the sneaky couple who had caused the car windows to fog over were older than he was, and he admonished them gently to move along and not cause any commotion at the newly-minted National Historic Landmark. Claire and Gavin laughed as they drove back to Boston, the rain now beating down heavily. They listened to music on the car radio and felt the jubilance and thrill of breaking the rules.

As they turned off the highway and approached the street where Gavin’s hotel was, he acknowledged to Claire that she was in no shape to return home, in the event that Frank was there. She glanced down and saw that he was right, her clothes and hair bearing streaks of mud and leaves from their forest dalliance, and her shoes soaked all the way through. “Perhaps I could trouble you to let me use your shower,” she asked him as she pulled the car into the hotel valet. They hurried in from the inclement weather and took the stairs up to his floor, wanting to avoid the elevator operator and stop every floor or two to continue necking on the landing.

When they finally got to Gavin’s hotel suite, they were panting and slick with sweat as well as rain, and they began peeling off their clothes as soon as they were inside the door. Gavin hoisted her up around his hips and she clutched onto him with her legs crossed behind his arse as he carried her into the bathroom. He stepped into the tub and set her down gently as he bent to close the curtain and turn on the shower.

They alternated between kissing and lathering each other’s bodies, their hands sliding over each other’s skin as they cleaned off the evidence of their road trip. Gavin’s hands found particular urgency in sudsing up Claire’s breasts and sliding his hands down her backside. His cock was stiff with want, and he pulled her close to him, but the difference in their height would have made it a feat of acrobatics for them to join together quite like this. Claire was too logical to risk such a thing on wet porcelain, anyway, so she turned around and pulled Gavin’s hands to hold onto her while she held herself steady against the tiled wall.

He bent his knees to lower himself as she pushed her hips back against him, and after a moment of fumbling, he was inside her, their bodies wet and slick as the warm water cascaded over their skin. Claire moaned as Gavin thrust into her, and she relished the sudden brushes of cold when his movements pushed her forward out of the steam. His body slapped against hers, and he dug his fingers into the flesh of her hips, holding on for balance. Claire braced her left forearm against the wall and moved her right hand down to touch herself as they fucked. Before long, she was trembling against him, and her legs buckled with her orgasm.

Thus wordlessly given permission to find his release, Gavin curled around Claire, flattening her body between himself and the wall as he pumped himself into her. He reached forward to hold and squeeze her breasts, earning high-pitched, “Oooh, ooh!” noises from her. Finally, his climax rocked them both, and he let out a low, strained noise before slipping out of her. Both a bit dizzy, they finished washing up, then turned off the stream of water.

A little while later, Claire sat on the couch in the plush hotel robe with her legs up on Gavin’s, where he thoughtfully massaged her toes and the balls of her feet as he was clothed only in a towel wrapped around his waist. She had her pants and sweater in her lap and was using a damp washcloth to work on minimizing the grass and dirt stains she’d acquired on her clothes. Her sneakers sat drying on the radiator, and Gavin was watching her at her work while they listened to the toothless crooning of Pat Boone’s take on “Moon River.”

Gavin snarked, “It’s no' so bad, for church music.”

Claire couldn’t even generously offer a satirical compliment. “He’s got no soul,” she decided, then determined that she’d done just as much as she could with her soiled garments.

“Yer hair is curly,” Gavin observed with a bit of surprise. Claire glanced up at a ringlet that had fallen over her forehead as her hair returned to its natural pattern after having been sodden.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to spend an hour in hot rollers before I can show my face at the hospital tomorrow,” she realized.

Gavin wasn’t surprised, but confirmed, “So I dinna get to keep ye here with me tonight?”

Claire leaned forward and kissed him softly. “Sorry. I’d better head home.” Gavin ran a hand down her back and over the softness of her round, terry cloth-covered behind, then gave it a little squeeze. “Thank ye for being a fine tour guide today,” he said with a smile.

It was evening when Claire quietly opened up her front door, and she was surprised to hear Brianna’s voice coming from Frank’s office. She stepped softly down the hallway to where she could listen to the muffled sounds of her daughter, weeping, to the warm and soothing tones of Frank in response as he comforted her. Claire’s instinct was to join them and find out what she could do to help, but she knew she didn’t look entirely presentable. Plus, from what she could hear, Brianna was confiding in her father, telling him about a boy she’d met at MIT and, it seemed, mad that he was beholden to another girl. Frank seemed to have the situation under control.

As she made her way upstairs to turn on her rollers and get ready for tomorrow’s work day, she let out a sigh. It was so important for a girl to have a loving, present father. Her chest felt tight as she acknowledged the gift of the bond that Frank and Brianna had. He’d been, in many ways, more mentor than father to her, but even the influence that Uncle Lamb had had on her own young life had made her into the woman she’d become. And three thousand miles away, Iona had Gavin. Claire silently thanked her for letting her borrow him. He may only be in her life for a few short days, but he had given her comfort.

And, something more. As she sat at her vanity and began brushing her hair into sections to be straightened, she saw in the mirror a vision of her younger self. Still with lines forming at the corners of her eyes, and strands of gray among the raven-black of her hair. But with a light behind her skin that she hadn’t seen there for many years. She had once been so voraciously desired, and had thought that part of her life was entirely in the rear view. What Gavin had shown her was that she was not, in fact, a nun. She was still the woman she had been all those years before. Perhaps with more wisdom now, and experience.

She tucked into bed with a satisfied sigh, and looked forward to hopefully gaining more experience, tomorrow.


	15. Dr. MacDreamy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to @Pamela+A+Fuhrman for inspiring the chapter title!
> 
> Gavin's time in Boston is coming to an end, and so too (soon) is this story. I think you'll all be happy with the resolution, but I have to give Claire and Dr. Stewart a few more hot & heavy moments before moving on to the next fic. I've been truly awed by your wonderful comments, and am so pleased to have taken this little journey with Claire in the midst of her life's lacuna. Enjoy the final chapters!

Claire followed the sound of uncharacteristically high-pitched voices into the bench seats of the operating theatre, where about a dozen nurses and surgical staff were observing the potential new hire in action. She suppressed a grin when she realized that the unusually high number of women in the theatre amounted to a gaggle of young women gazing admiringly at the fine figure Dr. Stewart cut, even in his shapeless operating attire. Despite the assorted crowd, he was engrossed in his work, maneuvering fastidiously with his gloved hands piecing together a patient. When an administrator watching him at work turned to shush the tittering whisperers in the theatre, the room quieted just enough to hear how Dr. Stewart focused his attention: by humming. As machines whirred and nurses proferred surgical tools, he was undoubtedly humming the pop melody of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

Indeed, it seemed Beatlemania had swept the female population of Mass. General, and the nurses were ushered out of the theatre by the administrator, who couldn’t tolerate their giggling. Joe rose from his seat to stand beside Claire and mutter quietly to her, “How’s my Lady Jane?”

Claire met Joe’s glance. “Happy,” she admitted, “for once.”

Joe smiled wide and leaned closer. “You might want to readjust that scarf; it seems you’ve acquired a…” ( _What was a more dignified word for ‘hickey’?_ ) “Contusion.” Claire’s cheeks burned red as she took Joe’s advice, then found a plausible reason to excuse herself.

The next days blended together in a mélange of the novel and the familiar. In between the routine schedule of surgeries, meetings, and supplemental research, Claire and Gavin found myriad creative excuses to sneak away for a quick pash in a stairwell, or settled for the exchange of secret glances in mixed company. When they once again had the chance to perform an operation together, Gavin by Claire’s side as she directed the surgery, it was a brand new experience of medicine as foreplay for both of them.

Afterwards, Gavin rushed Claire down the hallway looking for a room where they could find some privacy, under the pretense of requiring a tête-à-tête to debrief (figuratively). Claire found an underused supply closet, and they snuck inside, barricading the door with a tall stack of boxes containing heavy glass beakers of various sizes. Their mouths and hands were on each other within moments, and they shoved inventory aside in order to create a space wide enough for the two of them to stand wedged between each other and the crowded shelves.

At the risk of being caught in flagrante delicto, they peeled off their green scrubs and sought each other, testing the other’s readiness with hands, fingers, and interrogative grunts. Gavin hoisted Claire up onto a shelf, her backside perched precariously at just the right height as he pinioned her to it with his hips. She raked his shoulders with her fingernails as she struggled to balance, before bracing one foot against the nearest shelf she could reach. Gavin thrust himself into her, but they wobbled awkwardly once joined. Seeing that they would better maintain equilibrium if just one of them controlled the proceedings, Gavin took Claire’s wrists in his hands and pinned them up beside her head, pressing them into the shelving unit as he found his rhythm.

The feel of her pinched skin as her arms were flung back triggered a sense memory, and Claire moaned, loudly but without words. Her mind, body, and spirit cried out, ‘Jamie!’ but her mouth mercifully made only noise. Gavin quieted her with his kiss, pressing their lips together as sweat beaded on his chest. He pulled back just enough to rasp, “Someone'll hear ye!”

Claire chose to ignore this, her body craving to be transported to another time by the familiar sensations coursing through her. Instead of keeping her voice down, she gasped, “Harder!”

Gavin was not one to disobey an order like that, and rammed his body forward into hers. She yelped, and he clumsily passed one of her wrists to join her other in his right fist, as he clapped his left hand over her mouth. He whispered, roughly, “That I can do, but hush!”

He continued to drive into her as she whimpered against his palm, but her eyes were squeezed shut with bliss and nostalgia as she absorbed every blow of his body into hers. Finally, the toll of the onslaught accomplished its goal, and Claire wrapped her legs tight around Gavin’s body while she came, her entire body shuddering from her fingertips to her toes. The tight grip she had on him brought him to climax simultaneously, and despite himself Gavin let out a none-too-subtle, “Fuck!” as he spilled himself.

He released her wrists, and cradled her with his arms so that she wouldn’t fall from the shelf in their relaxed recovery. She leaned her arms back to keep herself upright as they disentangled, and they were both relieved to have plenty of gauze pads nearby to wipe the sweat off their glistening bodies. Gavin agreed to stay behind and rearrange the supplies they’d displaced while Claire left before him, lest anyone see them both leave the closet simultaneously.


	16. Fare Thee Well

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've made a companion playlist to this story, based on a recommendation! Hope you enjoy: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5qxvpGggCa27bdXorBNdHI

At the end of one day, many of the staff gathered in the employee break room to sit around the radio and listen to the season-opening away game as the Red Sox played at Yankee Stadium. Seeking to make a bit of trouble, Gavin entered the room then sidled next to Claire who was leaning against the back wall enjoying a beer. He slid one hand behind her, hidden underneath the drape of her white coat, and nestled it solidly around the swell of her arse. He called out to no one in particular, “Ah, the footy’s on?”

No one seemed to pay the oddly-accented fellow much attention, too engrossed in the match. Claire felt game for a bit of naughtiness, and offered, “You mean soccer?”

One of the orderlies shushed, not even turning his head toward her voice. She continued, “No Dr. Stewart, this is baseball. It’s like American cricket.”

More voices shushed them, and they giggled quietly to themselves. The break room door swung open and the revelers quieted a bit as Chief Quincy entered the room. “Carry on, carry on, just passing through,” he told them, as many returned to their focus on the radio.

“Stewart, just the man I was looking for,” he said as he made a beeline for Gavin. After a quick squeeze, Gavin removed his hand from Claire’s backside. Finally standing at chest-height opposite him, Quincy screwed up his face and made an expression of mock disgust. “I’ll say, Stewart, what kind of a gaudy necktie is that?”

Gavin clenched his jaw in quiet resignation to the indignity of his family colors being disrespected. “It’s the Stewart tartan,” he explained to a disinterested Quincy.

“Very well,” the Chief continued, “I need to go over a few things with you, can you come to my office at the next inning? I have to take a trip to the little boy’s room first.” He shuffled off without waiting for an answer. Gavin turned quizzically to Claire. “What’s an ‘inning’?”

Claire spoke quietly enough not to draw any more attention from the baseball fans. “Well I’m sure I’d rather be having a private audience with Quincy, but perhaps you can help me gather my notes before I’m off for the day?” She left the room with Gavin close on her heels, as she strode briskly down the hallway for a detour to her office, which was in the same direction as the Chief’s. She pulled him into the room and shut the door behind them, leaving the lights off as Joe had already left for home.

She pushed his back against the door to keep it closed, and tugged firmly on his necktie. “I like it,” she teased, and Gavin bent down to kiss her. She weaved out of his reach and slid her fingers down to feel the bulge of his arousal at the front of his pants. Gavin’s entire body stiffened before he weakly suggested, “I’ve no time; I’m off to the headmaster’s office, aye?”

Claire began unbuckling Gavin’s belt. “You started it, groping me in the break room,” she said, fairly. Gavin struggled to find words. “Aye, but…”

“So let me finish it,” Claire said, dropping to her knees and taking Gavin in her mouth. She worked him with one hand while eagerly licking and sucking to cause a ripple of stunned laughter in Gavin’s throat. “Christ,” he murmured as she bobbed back and forth, his eyes losing their focus as he tipped his head back to loll against the office door.

Claire could hear footsteps in the hallway outside, and thought by the gait that it could be Quincy, walking past en route to his own office. She made to speed up her movements and brought her other hand to cup the sensitive skin of his bollocks, lightly scratching with her fingernails as she did so. He came quickly, moaning as his hips jerked forward and Claire held fast, before neatly fastening his trousers and standing up.

“Ye’re a madwoman,” he panted, and she left him to regain his composure before he was due for his meeting with the Chief.

* * *

When Claire arrived at work the next morning, the secretary had left her a note saying that her attendance was requested to attend a meeting in the board room just before lunch. Her stomach lurched. Could her carelessness have resulted in her and Gavin being caught during any of their illicit rendezvous? Having never been called upon for disciplinary action, she wasn’t sure what to expect.

Upon entering the board room, she was surprised to see not only Chief Quincy, but a stately older woman in an elegant St. John suit, with pearls the size of molars adorning her ears, neck, and wrists. Quincy stood as Claire approached the table, and she reached across to shake the woman’s hand as he introduced them. Claire noticed a note of tension in his voice, though by the color in his face he was evidently making quite an effort to suppress it.

“Claire Randall, may I introduce Mrs. Marian Minot? Marian, this is Mrs.—Dr.—Claire Randall.”

“Dr. Randall, what a pleasure,” said Marian in a feminine, strong voice.

Quincy jumped in, “Mrs. Minot is the Chair...man of the Board. Wife of the late—”

“George Minot!” Claire began putting the pieces together. “Won the Nobel Prize for advancements in researching anemia!”

Marian was pleased that her husband’s work was well-known to Claire. The hospital had been co-founded by her great-great-grandfather-in-law, and it had been just as important in her life as it had been to her husband. She spoke directly to Claire. “I’m here to represent my fellow Massachusetts General trustees. As you know, we’ve been in the process of searching for a new Head of Trauma Surgery. We represent various civic interests of our community, and decisions about where the future of the hospital will go, in terms of innovation especially, are weighed very seriously by us.

“We’ve allowed the Chief of Medicine, with input from other department heads, to put forward certain nominees, but the Board has been paying close attention to the strides you’ve been making, Dr. Randall. The last of the external candidates that has been under consideration was impressive, but we will not be moving forward with that hire. Dr. Randall, I’m here to offer you the position.”

Claire was stunned. Marian continued, “There will be some interviews with trustees and investors, but they’re mostly ceremonial, so that people can put a face to the name and have a sense of who you are when asked about it on the golf course. Your record speaks for itself. And I don’t think you’re too foolish to understand that there will some opportunities for publicity in this new role. Regardless, you’re the right woman—the right _person_ —for the job. I wouldn’t feel comfortable offering you the position if it were merely symbolic.”

Quincy looked rather like he’d smelled something unpleasant on the bottom of his shoe. Claire had been so certain that the pervading close-mindedness that could limit her career had gone beyond her immediate supervisors, and perhaps it still did. But she had put in work, sacrificing nearly all else, and her efforts had been noticed. She would be Dr. Claire Randall, the first woman to head a surgery department at the hospital.

“We understand if you need to discuss with your husband, of course,” Quincy interjected.

Claire reached her hand out to shake Marian’s once again. “Mrs. Minot, I am honored to accept your offer. I look forward to getting to know you and the Board personally, and working together in the pursuit of knowledge.”

Once the details were sorted out, Claire was made to understand that she was not to let anyone outside of her family know about the news until a meeting could be convened and a press release scheduled. But she knew she had to talk to Joe before he heard it from anyone else. As she hurried back to their office, where she hoped she’d catch him in time to offer to treat him to lunch, she walked past the outgoing Trauma Head’s office, where she heard Gavin’s voice from outside the door.

She poked her head inside and caught his eye. From his temporary desk space by the entryway, he looked up at her with a smile, but was occupied on a phone call. “I canna wait to see ye, and for ye to tell us all about it, leannan,” he said, and Claire could hear faint tones of his daughter’s high voice on the other end. The retiring Trauma Head surgeon was at his desk, and Claire nodded at him in wordless greeting. He gave her a pleasant look of acknowledgment, and returned the nod. Clearly, he’d already been made aware of the Board’s decision, and it seemed he was well enough in support of it. Claire borrowed a notepad from the desk at which Gavin sat, and quickly wrote on it, “Lunch with Joe,” before passing the paper to him. His fingers brushed her hand, she smiled at him with a blush, and he mouthed ‘dinner?’ at her. She nodded in assent and was off.

“To the finest physician with whom I have ever had the pleasure to work,” Joe began what seemed to be a long, poetic toast delivered expressly with the intention of humiliating her. Claire clapped a hand to her face in faux exasperation. Eventually he ran out of steam.

“Dr. Claire, ‘the Lady Jane’ Randall, a brilliant surgeon and a hell of a friend.”

Claire felt self-conscious. “You’re sure it’s going to be alright?” Joe had been her only true friend for so long. What if the dynamic was irreparably affected by the shift in power dynamics with her having been favored for a promotion that both of them were long shots for?

“My dear, I am truly eager to work in _your_ department. And I won’t mind a bit if you throw your weight around a little, wield that influence to make sure I get to scrub in on the best surgeries…” They laughed, and Claire reached across the table to place her hand on Joe’s. She gave it a friendly squeeze that carried years of camaraderie and understanding. As their meal progressed, they hypothesized how some of the thornier surgeons and department heads would react to a woman being chosen for the job, while also sharing big-sky dreams about what they could accomplish in medicine.

As the hour was winding down, Joe changed the subject. “So, LJ, we get you back after tomorrow, isn’t that right?”

Claire took his meaning. “You mean, a certain distraction is returning to Scotland?”

“Are you going to be alright?”

Claire thought for a quick moment. “I feel a bit more ‘me’ than I’ve felt in some time. There was never going to be more than… just this. Just these few days. And that’s good enough.”

Joe could read her. She was being completely genuine. Claire ventured one more insight. “You don’t suppose we could pretend that I’ve got plans with you and Gail tonight, in case anyone asks?”

Joe smirked. “Okay, but espionage and intrigue are off the table when you start making more money than me.”

* * *

Claire rested her head on Gavin’s chest, as the two lay in his hotel room, the day’s waning sunlight streaming through the window. They had decided to order dinner from room service and spend a bit more time horizontal on his last night in Boston. She didn’t mention the promotion to him, although she wasn’t entirely sure he didn’t know.

Gavin hesitantly acknowledged the impending farewell. “It willna be easy going back to work without the anticipation of looking forward to seeing you, Claire.”

She looked at him. “I had forgotten what it’s like to not feel like a stranger in my own skin. I’ll always be glad we had this.”

“It’s years now without Mary. It sometimes feels like I lost her just yesterday. But I’m thinking she’d no’ be pleased wi’ me if I gave up on companionship entirely. I think I’ll always have a fondness for Boston.”

She laid a kiss on his fuzzy chest, and said quietly, “Thank you.” She had intended to thank Gavin, for reminding her that she was more than a mother, more than a doctor, even. She was a woman, still, and grateful to be. She also felt a tug in her heart that made her think she was thanking Jamie, as well, for having loved her so completely that she would always carry the spark within her. This week she had finally found a flint to help it ignite.

Claire prepared to leave Gavin’s room shortly before midnight, after they’d shared one last dance beneath the bedclothes. He’d fallen soundly asleep, the anticipated jetlag of his upcoming transatlantic journey leaving him even more exhausted, on top of the exertion of their intimate activity. He laid on his stomach on the left side of the bed, and she looked over him for a moment as he snored peacefully. His long body, large and pale. His smooth back, marked only by freckles. The ghastly scar twisting the underside of his left arm. His red-brown hair, shining copper in the moonlight. Claire touched it with the lightest brush of her fingertips, and quietly stepped out into the hallway.

The next morning, before a meeting was called to announce Claire’s promotion to the rest of the department, she sat alone in her office tidying up her things. The flowers that had been sitting there for the week were nearing their demise, and she pulled out one of the white roses that still held a firm shape. She opened to the center of one of the heaviest books on her desk, the 27th edition of Gray’s _Anatomy_ , and pressed the flower inside, before closing the tome and replacing it between her bookends.

Claire opened her window a bit so that she could breathe the outside air in deep, and let it steady her. She closed her eyes and inhaled for four, out for four. She opened her eyes to see her little yellow finch, having quietly alighted on the window sill. He hopped a few times, coming in to stand inquisitively on her desk. Despite the bird being wild and, well, a bird, Claire felt warm inside, like she had when she’d held Brianna in her arms as a baby and she’d looked up at her. She gently reached a finger out, and the finch let her stroke his soft, bright feathers.

“Hello,” she said quietly, and the bird chirped out a few small, pleasant noises. Then, in a moment, it was gone, flying back out the window to continue its life’s journey. Claire whispered after it, “Goodbye.”


	17. Epilogue

Boston, 1968

Claire collapsed into the couch, holding in her hands the evidence that young Roger Wakefield had brought her. “Alexander Malcolm.” She read the words off the page over and over again, until they blurred together in her mind like the ramblings of a zealot. She remembered standing across from him outside that drafty church when he first told her his full name. Her hands began to tremble and she dropped the paper into her lap.

“Claire, are ye alright?” Roger stood over her nervously, unsure what to do. “D’ye need some water, or…?”

“Whisky. I need a drink,” Claire said in a thin voice. She had traveled through time not once, but twice. Yet the twisted path from grief to sorrow to closure to hope to resignation had given her more whiplash than either journey through the stones. The shock of learning that Jamie had survived Culloden had not abated, although after chasing dead ends in their research, Claire had tried to convince herself that it was important that she preserve her content and peaceful life. But Roger, too, was a romantic. He saw in Claire that she would never give up loving the 18th century Highlander. So he hadn’t given up the search. And Claire was beginning to come around to his conviction.

He sat beside her and pressed a glass into her hand. As they drank, Claire peppered him with half-formed questions.

“A printer?”

“Aye, and a patriotic one at that.”

“Edinburgh?”

“Indeed.”

“Married?”

“Ah… I dinna ken.” Roger frowned, but knew he could offer no certainty. “Records of the sort could be verra hard to find, but I havena seen anything to suggest it. In particular as he wasna using his real name.”

“But—alive?”

“Aye, I believe so.”

As the whisky warmed Claire from within, she began to feel more solid, and less like a collection of disparate cells untethered from each other. The strength of her resolve was growing. She had mourned him for so long. A part of her had died on Culloden Moor. And just as Jamie had lived many years in Ardsmuir, she too had lived in a prison of sorts. But she could return to him now. They could be together, the two of them, one body and one soul.

“Well, I suppose I’m going back to Scotland, then.”

* * *

Edinburgh, 1969

“Mail for ye, Dr. Stewart,” the secretary called out as Gavin passed her desk. She handed him a plump envelope and he took it to investigate in his office. Postmarked from Inverness? Who did he know in Inverness? He sliced it open and pulled out a letter folded around a flat, preserved white rose, a flower that had been pressed with some care. Curiously, he began to read the letter, but stopped with a shock when he saw the letterhead, “From the desk of Dr. Claire Randall,” and the date from many months prior: October 1968.

> Dear Gavin,
> 
> If you’re receiving this letter, well then I’ve done it. I've found a way to return to my old life. From before Harvard, before the hospital, and long before you knew me. And in that case, I am writing to you to share the news that I am well, and I am happy. It’s quite complicated, but please, take my word for it that everything has worked out.
> 
> I wonder if you’ve heard the news that Massachusetts General has appointed a new Head of Trauma Surgery: one Dr. Joseph Abernathy. As the outgoing boss herself, I couldn’t be more thrilled. I was very satisfied with what I was able to accomplish during my years in the role, but as you once said, family is more important than chasing the next promotion. With Frank passed away, bless his soul, and Brianna now grown and fiercely independent (takes after me), the time had come for me to look after myself.
> 
> But that’s all a bit of the newsy update, cryptic as it may be. In truth, I’m writing for more personal reasons. I’m writing to thank you for having been a light in my life when I didn’t even know how much I needed it. For over fifteen years I had withered on the vine, and if it hadn’t been for your friendship during the time we spent in each other’s company, then I may still be there.
> 
> Instead, I found myself again. And it drove me to be the best surgeon I could be. For what is a physician without hope? If I couldn’t even begin to imagine the slightest bit of happiness for myself, then how could I imagine the miraculous recovery of a patient brought back to life by extraordinary measures? Ultimately, this hope led me to a search, that led me to… my future. And I couldn’t be more grateful.
> 
> I’ve thought of you from time to time and have wished only the best for you and your daughter. I have no doubt that you are raising her to be a wonderful young woman. I only hope that you have comfort in your personal life as well, and pray that I could have been even a bit of the balm for you that you were for me. May the years ahead bring you good health and a life full of love.
> 
> Fondly, Claire

Gavin hardly knew what to make of the letter, but he smiled, thinking of Claire describing herself as happy. He had thought of her many times, and hoped that she was living a life as rich as the one she deserved. He was grateful for her too, having brought him out of a shell in which he didn’t even know he was living.

“Daddy!” Iona bounded into the office, all long legs and long blonde hair. She was in her final year before uni, and still his little girl. He folded up the letter and placed it back in the envelope, along with the flower. With a gentle laugh he wrapped his daughter in a bear hug. She was followed close behind by a beautiful middle-aged woman wearing a stylish pair of bold eyeglasses. She leaned in for a kiss and Gavin happily obliged.

“Hello, my darling women,” he exclaimed, gathering up his coat and briefcase. “Where shall we go this fine evening? And tonight it’s Imogene’s turn to choose!”

Just then, the secretary rapped her knuckles on the door and popped her head in. “Pardon me, Dr. Stewart, would ye have a moment to call upon Dr. Woodward? He’s left a message asking after ye.”

Gavin put his arms around the two most important people in his world. “I’m off the clock, I’m afraid. Off to dinner with my wife and daughter.”

* * *

Edinburgh, 1766

Claire smoothed her hands over her midsection as she sat in the carriage approaching what she’d come to know as the Old Town of the city. She alternately wanted to pound her fist on the window and scream at the driver to hurry, and hope that they’d get a wheel stuck in the mud so that she’d have a little more time to steel her nerves. The journey from Inverness had been like a waking dream, and her attention fixated on a pinpoint in front of her.

One of the other passengers in the carriage leaned forward to peer out the window and observe, “Oh, Craigmillar Castle!” Claire turned her attention to the scenery on her own side of the carriage. As they ambled along, she observed an almost stately manor that she recognized. It was quite different from how it would look in the 20th century, but here, only a couple of decades old, was the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, Scotland’s first voluntary hospital.

Her physician’s instinct swelled, and she felt a surge of curiosity to see inside, what patients she could help and how techniques were being developed. As the carriage continued on, she wondered how many people had been healed on these hallowed grounds. Her heartbeat pulsed in her belly, and she remembered how she had been set on the path to healing by a man who would one day work on this very site, practicing medicine and saving lives. She felt suddenly very aware of her body; the way her unusual clothing hugged her frame, and the feel of her body jostling through space as the carriage rolled down the street.

‘Get a bloody move on!’ Claire thought, desperate to lay her eyes upon Jamie, and unwilling to waste any more time living without him. Minutes later, they were disembarking among the bustling crowds on the Old Town’s main thoroughfare. Claire caught the attention of a young boy selling wares.

“Pardon—I’m looking for a printer. Mr. Malcolm; Alexander Malcolm.”

“Aye, just down the way and to the left. Carfax Close, madam.”

“Thank you.”

Claire walked on, an invisible force pulling her forward, toward the love of her life, to the man that had been her every heartbeat for over twenty years.

❦

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 😭 I've had an absolutely wonderful time working on this story. Massive thanks to everyone who encouraged me in the comments and joined me on this journey. I look forward to continuing to spin tales for our favorite Outlander characters, and welcome prompts or suggestions for other fics!


	18. Epilogue II: From Here to Eternity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Okay I guess I wasn't *quite* finished! Some commenters had requested one more chapter to follow Claire's reunion with Jamie after the events of my story detailing her affair with Gavin. So please enjoy the escapades that transpire when, years later, she admits to him that Frank was not the only man with whom she shared a bed during the twenty years that they were apart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I gave quite a lot of thought to when and how this revelation would occur. There are certain scenes the pair share in the books beginning with their reunion in Voyager, when it's hinted at that Jamie has slept with other women than the ones we know about for sure. Later, in A Breath of Snow and Ashes, Jamie confesses to Claire about Mary McNab, and the conversation is awkward and jealous, though largely affected by the false accusation made just prior by Malva Christie. And there are infrequent allusions to Claire's love life before Jamie, flirtations carried on during her time deployed in WWII, juvenile dalliances with boys she met when she was still traveling the world with her uncle. I always liked that Claire did have experience beyond her two husbands, as it's more relatable, in my opinion, just like Jamie had non-consummated romances before he met her, as with Annalise de Marillac.
> 
> So, I found a spot for this second epilogue to "A Stranger Visits," at the end of chapter 79 of Echo in the Bone. Jamie and Claire are in Scotland, and he has taken her to the cave, where he tells her that he would think of her and their baby being with him during his years of solitude. Claire also experiences déjà vu, feeling as if she'd been in that cave sometime before. Though he doesn't talk to her about his night with Mary McNab just then, it suits my feeling that when she arrived to bring Jamie comfort, Claire's spirit somehow sanctioned the temporary union. Just as I hope my readers could tell that somehow Jamie sent comfort to Claire, in the body of Dr. Gavin Stewart.
> 
> The story below begins with the final paragraphs of Echo in the Bone chapter 79, copied verbatim from the original. Laoghaire is mentioned because her daughter Joan has asked Jamie to help encourage her mother to marry her companion, so that they will be financially stable and no longer living in sin, freeing Joan to fulfill her dream of joining the convent. After that, I took it from there...keeping it in the first person to match the paragraphs borrowed from the book, despite my writing style typically being in third person perspective.

Lallybroch, 1778

> The wind had quieted and the sun was bright and warm—for the moment. I could see clouds lurking over the horizon, and doubtless it would be raining again by nightfall, but for the moment it was a lovely spring day, and we were both disposed to enjoy it. By unspoken consent, we put aside all disagreeable matters and talked of nothing in particular, only enjoying each other’s company, until we reached a shallow, grass-covered mound where we could perch and enjoy the sun.
> 
> Jamie’s mind seemed to return now and then to Laoghaire, though—I supposed he couldn’t help it. I didn’t really mind, as such comparisons as he made were entirely to my benefit.
> 
> “Had she been my first," he said thoughtfully at one point, "I think I might have a much different opinion of women in general."
> 
> “Well you can’t define all women in terms of what they’re like—or what one of them is like—in bed," I objected. "I’ve known men who, well…"
> 
> “Men? Was Frank not your first?" he demanded, surprised.
> 
> I put a hand behind my head and regarded him.
> 
> “Would it matter if he wasn’t?"
> 
> “Well…" Clearly taken aback by the possibility, he groped for an answer. "I suppose—" He broke off and eyed me, meditatively stroking one finger down the bridge of his nose. One corner of his mouth turned up. "I don’t know."
> 
> I didn’t know, myself. On the one hand, I rather enjoyed his shock at the notion—and at my age, I was not at all averse to feeling mildly wanton, if only in retrospect. On the other hand…
> 
> “Well, where do you get off, anyway, casting stones?"
> 
> “Ye were _my_ first," he pointed out, with considerable asperity.
> 
> “So you _said_ ," I said, teasing. To my amusement, he flushed up like the rosy dawn.
> 
> “Ye didna believe me?" he said, his voice rising in spite of himself.
> 
> “Well, you did seem rather well informed, for a so-called virgin. To say nothing of...imaginative."
> 
> “For God’s sake, Sassenach, I grew up on a farm! It’s a verra straightforward business, after all." He looked me closely up and down, his gaze lingering at certain points of particular interest. "And as for imagining things...Christ, I’d spent months—years!—imagining!" A certain light filled his eyes, and I had the distinct impression that he hadn’t stopped imagining in the intervening years, not by any means.
> 
> “What are you thinking?" I asked, intrigued.
> 
> “I’m thinking that the water in the loch’s that wee bit chilly, but if it didna shrink my cock straight off, the feel of the heat when I plunged into ye...Of course," he added practically, eyeing me as though estimating the effort involved in forcing me into the loch, "we wouldna need to do it _in_ the water, unless ye liked; I could just dunk ye a few times, drag ye onto the shore, and—God, your arse looks fine, wi’ the wet linen of your shift clinging to it. It goes all transparent, and I can see the weight of your buttocks, like great smooth round melons—"
> 
> “I take it back—I don’t want to know what you’re thinking!"
> 
> “You asked," he pointed out logically, "And I can see the sweet wee crease of your arse, too—and once I’ve got ye pinned under me and ye canna get away...d’ye want it lying on your back, Sassenach, or bent over on your knees, wi’ me behind? I could take a good hold either way, and—"
> 
> “I am not going into a freezing loch in order to gratify your perverted desires!"
> 
> “All right," he said, grinning. Stretching himself out beside me, he reached round behind and took a generous handful. "Ye can gratify them here, if you like, where it’s warm.”

I kissed him then, chastely, and he seemed to, even if momentarily, contentedly resign himself to the notion that we weren’t about to frolic in the frigid lake, whereupon we could be spotted by any number of kin and clansmen. He settled his chin on the top of my head and spoke softly, as if to himself.

“There was no one before you, mo cridhe. There is no one but you, for me.”

My eyes watered. I knew that while we were separated, there had been women. Laoghaire, of course, even if only a handful of times. Geneva Dunsany—he had been her first, and only. Perhaps kind women who had shown some tenderness to him when he was desperate, in between years as a hermit or a prisoner. I felt jealousy, but also sympathy. I wanted to know, but I didn’t need to have the details of it. We had been apart, and that had been the injustice, not any physical transactions that betrayed nothing of our love.

I had lived for twenty years in a sorrow so deep that I could hardly imagine an alternative. But I could never truly understand the magnitude of Jamie’s loneliness during that time. Beyond the safe and comfortable life that I was able to live, thanks to him, pursuing a career that gave me purpose… I had Brianna. He… had no one.

“When we first lay together,” I began, “I was frightened, as you know.” Jamie let out a slight huff, and gladly joined me on the journey to this cherished memory we shared. “I hadn’t a clue how I’d found myself taking a husband in the eighteenth century, or what would come next.”

His arm tightened around me, wordlessly conveying his regret that I had been living such turmoil in those months before I revealed my truth to him, after the witch trial.

“In spite of myself, I wanted you. Badly,” I admitted, to a warm chuckle. “And I cared for you. But...I also felt a weight of duty to you.”

With his unfailing logic, Jamie interceded, “Aye. Ye had a duty to me as your husband, in addition to the legal necessity of consummation to protect you.”

“No. Well—yes, but...that’s not what I mean.” I continued, “I had a duty to guide you. To welcome you across the veil of virginity and give you a positive experience. One you would remember and that wouldn’t...I don’t know, damage you forever!” I laughed at the ridiculousness of these ineffectual words that could not convey my meaning.

“Damage me forever ye did, Sassenach!” He planted a kiss on my mouth. “Damaged for all women from here to eternity, as I would be yours every day of my life, and every century after.”

I smiled up at him, the thought of us embracing and kissing passionately beside the water’s edge seeming somewhat less objectionable for some reason that I couldn’t quite put a finger on.

“Was your first time...damaging, then?” he asked suddenly, his voice low and slightly on the edge of fury. He knew well enough the damage that aberrant sex can do, when it is against one party’s will. As did I.

“Hm.” I thought for a moment. In truth, I had been so young. Some moments of it I could remember with perfect clarity. Others were hazy, as if filmed through a lens smeared heavily with Vaseline.

“Ye dinna have to tell me, Claire,” he began, but I did want to share even this deep recessed part of myself with him.

“We were children, almost. Pubescent, I suppose, but not wise enough to know that our actions could have consequences.”

“Many an adult doesna consider the consequences,” Jamie offered. Fair enough.

“We were both so curious. And it felt good. But then, I supposed that it might be the only way to communicate with boys. As a teenager, I experimented. But, it felt hollow. There was a void in me that could not be filled by sex.”

Jamie was tense. He couldn’t have been pleased to think of my body at the use of others, even if it was many years before he’d ever known me.

“And then, there was Frank,” he half-asked, half-stated.

“With him, I felt comfort. I was safe, and he was...my family. Then we were apart for many years, during the war. But I didn’t have the need to...experiment, anymore.” Jamie’s next words were likely spoken out loud to reassure himself of their veracity.

“Then there was me.”

“Yes. And only you, forever.”

“When I sent ye back,” he paused, his voice tightening. Neither of us wanted to recall the day when we lost each other. Although we could never forget. “I prayed that you’d have that again. Wi’ Frank. To be safe, and have comfort, and family.

“And when I _lived_...when the grief of losing you was eating me up inside. I’d think of you sometimes, finding more than that—finding _love_ with him again. And the anger would feed me when I was hungry and let me forget the sadness, for a moment.”

“Jamie—” I looked him straight in the eye then, desperate for him to see my built-in polygraph. “I was safe, and I was comfortable, and he was my family. But I did not love him again. I could never love anyone else but you.”

He smiled, the remembered anger fading in his chest. “Aye, I know that, Sassenach. I knew it then, too. It was only the missing you…”

We kissed, deeply, and with an edge of sadness. As we unjoined, he suddenly made a quizzical expression. “Sassenach,” he began.

“Yes?” I asked slowly, knowing well enough not to trust this curious furrow of his brow.

“Ye did bed him again, didn’t ye?”

“What?”

“I ken well enough that twenty years is a fair long time to go wi’out a warm body underneath ye. But the man did raise my daughter and provide ye wi’ house and home, aye? Ye canna have denied him for the run of it, Claire?”

I was both shocked and offended. I smacked my palm against his unyielding chest. “What kind of a question is that? Are you implying that I somehow...owed him sex on your behalf?”

“No! Well...yes, a bit.” I smacked him again.

“He was your husband, no? He canna have let you keep him chaste for all those many years?”

“Jamie Fraser, what do you know!” My blood boiled. The man absolutely was _not_ chaste ‘for all those many years,’ though by and large, I was. How could Jamie consider Frank’s sex life above mine?

“Yes, damn it,” I capitulated. “Yes, we slept together, sometimes. Of course we did. It took time, after…”

I wasn’t sure if I should continue. I didn’t need to hear the gory details of what had transpired between him and Geneva, or whomever, despite the fact that I could imagine it well enough. “Do you really want to know?”

Jamie thought for a moment, then conceded. “Aye, I do. But only...if you want to tell me.”

Thus having surrendering the boiling argument, Jamie looked skyward. My body softened. “It took a long time. After Brianna was born and my body was returning somewhat to normal.”

My hand moved automatically to my belly, remembering the time when she was a part of me. Blood of my blood. “He waited. Until I was ready. But, I never really was ready _enough_ , for him.”

Jamie waited, politely. “I could never forget you. I couldn’t touch _myself_ without imagining you. I certainly couldn’t touch him without wanting him to be you. He could tell.”

Jamie let out a small grunt of understanding. Of course, he had spent time struggling to find common ground in Laoghaire’s marital bed, before giving up to live separately. Just as I had.

I continued, “Initially it made him furious. Eventually it made him...disinterested. He could be so cruelly passive, sometimes. I didn’t want to be enemies. I set him free.”

Jamie’s body twitched. Clearly this had come as a surprise to him, causing shock just as had my earlier revelation that I had not been a virgin upon my first wedding day. “So, ye lived apart, as did I when I moved to Edinburgh after only a few months at Balriggan?”

“Ah, not quite,” I admitted. “We were, to the outside world, a traditional family. And when it came to raising Brianna, we were partners bound by our love for her. But outside of parenting, and occasional social obligations, we led separate lives. Strangers under the same roof. I had my work. He had...a personal life.”

If the notion of a sanctioned understanding between husband and wife was uncommon in the 1950s and ‘60s, then doubtless it was queer to an 18th century Highlander. Countless spouses were unfaithful of course, but outside of France, at least some sort of willful ignorance was expected, if only from the woman.

“And you...never laid with a man after those early days with Frank in Boston? Your body laid fallow for all those years?” His tone was odd. I could feel the heat of him, his muscles tensing in acknowledgment that my body was his alone, but his heart also sick that I had been as lonely as he. I turned to my side to look squarely at him. He ran a hand over my waist, hip, and thigh, almost like a mechanic appraising a car.

“Why do you want to know?”

His hand continued journeying over the fabric of my gown, tracing the topography of my body. I could feel his desire piqued as he looked me over. “Ye said you had felt a duty to be responsible for, in the act of deflowering me. And so you gave me mastery of your body.”

I smiled, skeptically amusing him. “Yes, master.”

“And I came to know your body as the most fantastic treasure. An able, beautiful exterior to the heart of my love, the mind of my healer, and the spirit of my own. And just as fine an exterior one could hope for, designed to be used passionately, and well, and often, for its own maintenance if not for my own.”

Indeed he _was_ talking about me like I was a car. Men. No matter the century.

His voice changed. “And for all those years ye had rare talents wasted, skills unappreciated, and needs...unmet.” His hand continued its meditative unbroken passage over and around the swells of me. He did seem to understand the truth of what my situation had been, for many years of my marriage with Frank. But that wasn’t all of it.

“There was one...” I admitted, unsure if I was speaking to reassure him, or out of guilt, or simply out of a desire for him to know. Jamie’s hand stilled.

“There was one man,” I continued, unsteady. “After years without, I spent a few days with one man. Before Frank died. Before I knew...that you lived.”

Jamie’s voice sounded hollow. “Ye didna love him.” It wasn’t a question.

“I didn’t love him.”

We were both quiet, for a moment. He ventured a question. “Was it...damaging?”

“No! It was...healing.”

Jamie’s hand resumed its languid path over the fabric of my dress. He was quiet and looked to be in deep contemplation. I reached my hand forward to rest on his chest, and lightly grasped the fabric of his shirt. Jamie looked at me and hesitated. It seemed even he was unsure whether or not he wanted to say the next words that came out of his mouth.

“Tell me.”

“What do you want to know?”

He propped himself up on one elbow so that he loomed larger than me, and his hand began sliding up the hem of my skirts, so that he could gently stroke his fingertips on my calf and ankle. My heart fluttered as I saw the familiar cues that his body was shifting gears, switching from conversation to action.

“Tell me, were your talents and skills...appreciated?” His fingers journeyed higher, grazing my inner thighs and beginning to rake my skin lightly with his broad fingernails. Could he actually want for me to talk him through it? To tell him details about a time I bed another man? I supposed I’d try, and see where that got me.

“Yes, I—I believe they were.” Jamie’s hand was closing in on its target as he moved his touch all around my sensitive areas, but never quite touching them. His palm was warm on the cheeks of my arse, and he tugged lightly at my pubic hairs, but he avoided giving me the satisfaction of making contact with my sex.

“And were your needs...met?” His touch ventured higher, over the soft skin on my belly, and my naked hips underneath my shift and petticoats. I began scooting closer to him, wordlessly urging him to quell my anticipation.

“With him...I could think of you,” I said honestly. “It wasn’t the...betrayal, that it had been with Frank.” Jamie could sense the sadness that was part of the memory. His touch was gentle, but still studiously avoided my need. He leaned to trail his lips and tongue on my neck and collarbone, urging my arousal to meet his. In between kisses, he repeated, “Were…your needs...met?”

“They were,” I declared breathlessly, moving my hand to his elbow so that I could encourage him to touch me where I was suddenly desperately wanting. I hadn’t thought of Gavin in years, but suddenly I remembered melting like an ice cube in his hotel bed, the thaw that he began which ultimately was completed by my reunion with Jamie.

He removed his hand from beneath my skirt and grabbed mine where I was trying to guide him. He pushed it down to the earth beside my head, and shifted his weight to roll half on top of me. He pinched my legs closed against each other with one knee on the ground to my side. Jamie’s mouth possessed mine as he pressed me back. He moved to kiss my neck and suck my earlobe into his mouth.

“I suppose I’m glad ye were able to have pleasure, Claire, but I mean to remind ye...that he was only keeping ye warm for me, aye?” There was mischief in his voice as he nibbled on me. He would have his desires gratified here, and soon, and that was simply going to be the way of it. His mouth moved closer down to the swell of my breasts.

He mumbled into them, “Did he do the thing with your breasts that ye like so well?” As he spoke, he moved his hand from mine to pull away at the laces of my dress, freeing me enough for my bosom to slip out of its covering. Once he could, Jamie pinched one nipple, hard, and tugged at it, pulling my body off the ground a bit as my back arched. I moaned, a high, pleading noise that satisfied Jamie enough to release my tender flesh.

“Did he?”

I panted, “No, he didn’t quite do that.”

“What did he do?”

“He...sucked on them,” I said, not entirely wanting to admit the details of my pleasure with another man, but also helpless to the lewdness with which Jamie was demanding to be regaled. He bent to trace the tip of his tongue over and around the soft, white skin of my breasts, but he carefully skipped over my nipples and areolae.

He tugged my bodice open further, and I began to have an uncontrollable urge to reach up and claim him, wrapping my legs around his hips and probing his mouth with my tongue. Jamie stopped me, clutched one hand into my hair while continuing to lay my dress open around me, the cold air beckoning goose pimples all over my skin.

“Did he use your mouth, Sassenach?” His hold on my hair pulled my head back, and my mouth dropped open, as if in illustration of the question. I hesitated to respond. He tightened his grip a bit, repeating the question and tugging at the roots of my curls.

“Yes,” I said, shutting my eyes tight at the fear of seeing his reaction to this. I reopened them at the sound of his belt unbuckling and saw his cock bob out of his breeks as he undid them. I reached for him, scrambling to lean against his thighs, now desperate to pleasure him. Remembering Gavin reminded me how much I’d hungered to join my body with Jamie’s, but thought it impossible. Now, here he was before me and I was not going to underappreciate him.

He sat back on his heels, kneeling while I laid in his lap and took him into my mouth. He released a groan as I moved with purpose, feeling the shape of him with my tongue and squeezing my lips tight. After a few minutes, his hand returned to my hair and he pulled my head back, interrupting my activity and looking into my eyes with lust. He looked almost feral, strands of his red-gold hair loosed from his queue, sweat beading in the hollow at the base of his neck, and his cock standing straight out from his open trousers, slick with my saliva.

“Did he taste you, Claire?” His voice was challenging, and I couldn’t tell what answer he wanted. I bit my lip, and settled on the truth, of course.

“He did.” As I said it, his hand tightened in my hair. If he was determined to show me that he was to be the alpha and the omega of my sexual pleasure, then I would let him.

“He served me, Jamie.”

As intended, this drove him to a place of jealousy that would not be ameliorated until his pride, his honor, had been proven. He rucked up my skirts then and pulled me closer to him. He was still on his knees beside my head as I lay on the ground looking up at him, and I reached to close my hand around his cock once more. I pulled him to me, so that I could recline fully and still taste him, and he leaned over me to slide his cock into my mouth, with his hands planted on either side of my body.

With my dress bunched up around my hips and my knees bent, I shivered at the cold air off the loch brushing against my exposed flesh. The hairs on my thighs stood upright above my gartered stockings, and the wetness on my sex felt chilled by the breeze. Jamie’s hips flexed as he let himself be served by me, and he stroked my thigh with the side of his face. His stubble scratched my soft skin, and he breathed deep, inhaling my scent before he bent down to kiss between my legs.

It was alternately distracting and heavenly to feel him closing his lips around me, licking me in long strokes and short flicks of the tongue, as I worked toward his pleasure. I was delighted in the feel of him looming over me, his body blocking out the sun. I could reach my arms up and run my hands over the muscles of his buttocks as he dipped into my mouth, but restrained himself from impaling me with his full length. Occasionally he would suck or pinch my sensitive folds in just such a way that I would tremble beneath him, moaning around his member or accidentally grazing him with my teeth.

As the sensation grew more and more delectable, I squeezed my legs closer, the tops of my thighs pressing down on Jamie’s shoulders. His fierceness increased, and he began shaking his head from side to side, like an animal. He rested more of his weight on me, leaning on his elbows as he moved his hands up to grip the backs of my thighs. He spread me open and pulled my pelvis up so that he could access all of me, and he dove in, grinding against me with his mouth, his chin, his nose, until I was slippery as an eel beneath him.

I lost my hold on him when my orgasm came, crying out and clamping my thighs tight against his head. My fingernails dug into the skin of his backside, and his cock twitched against his abdomen as I let go of it. As my head lolled onto the ground, Jamie leaned back to look at me, sweating and red-faced from pleasure. He stood, and began pulling off his boots and breeks, and untied his hair, so that he was left in only his shirt, tented in front by his still-wanting need. I looked up at him and marveled at how often I had fantasized about seeing him, touching his body, joining with him, in the decades we were apart.

I reached my hands down over my own body and pulled my half-open dress all the way off, peeling down my stockings until I, too, was in only my shift, my hair loose around my shoulders with bits of dirt and grass in it. Jamie bent down to lift me, and carried me in his arms to the water’s edge. I laughed and then reached my face up to kiss him.

“So you _are_ going to have me in this water, whether I like it or not!”

“Believe me, Sassenach, ye’ll like it.”

He strode into the loch until we were both submerged to roughly chest-level. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and kissed him, desperate for the heat of his body to soften the shock of cold that I felt as soon as my body touched the water. His penis had softened momentarily upon being submerged, but I could feel it hardening again, as my nipples—solid as ice—rubbed against his chest, the wet fabric of our shirts sticking to our skin between us.

Jamie reached down and pulled my legs up to wrap around his waist. I felt a rush of cold as the water flowed between my legs. I was floating, partially weightless, but anchored to him. He pulled my body down onto him, and his cock thrust up into me, our bodies joining with such a wet heat that I was sure we’d create our own current adjacent to the chilly water of the loch.

“Oh, God,” Jamie cried out. He was generally hardy enough not to complain of cold, but the molten temperature inside my body had brought him a feeling of ecstasy. We slid against each other in a slippery embrace, desperate to find each other across the memory of our separation. Without a stable tether to gravity, it became difficult to maneuver as our movements quickened, and the buoyancy of the water threatened to carry us further into deeper waters. We wanted to laugh, and grunt, and cry, and there was such a freedom to having no sense of guile when joining with the one you love.

“Well, then, are you happy now? Not quite as you imagined?” I teased him, knowing too well that I had been proven wrong as well, as the experience of coupling in the cold water was surely more erotic than I had initially assumed.

“I said I’d dunk ye a few times, and I have,” he said, in a way of defending himself. “Now, stay put as I honor my other promise and drag you out onto the shore.”

He swam forward with me hooked around his body, and made big, splashing strides once his feet met the shallow bottom. We were still partially submerged when he tumbled forward, ravishing me against the sandy earth at the water’s edge. We rolled around each other as we kissed, our bodies finding equilibrium again as the temperature around us became somewhat less shocking. Finally, we settled in one place as we kissed, deeply, and I remembered why this had seemed somewhat familiar when he'd described the fantasy, picturing Deborah Kerr in Burt Lancaster’s embrace in the crashing surf on Oahu.

Jamie pulled his face away from mine and cupped my chin in one hand. “You’re mine, Claire,” he reminded me unnecessarily.

“Yours alone,” I agreed. He turned me around a bit roughly until I was facing away from him, cupped into the curve of his body.

“And there’s that fine arse that’s mine as well. Your white skin all pink from the cold, an’ I can see it rippled with gooseflesh through your sodden shift.” He gripped my haunch and pressed his cock against my backside, still hard with our lovemaking not yet finished.

“Yours alone,” I repeated, and tipped forward until I was supporting my own weight on my knees and forearms, with my hips in the air. Jamie rolled with me, finding his balance with one leg propped up alongside me as he grabbed the flesh of my hips with his big, sure hands. I reached one hand underneath myself to take his cock and guide him into the folds of myself, then set to rub my own mound of pleasure as he gleefully pulled me back against him. There was joy in our movements, as we physically reminded ourselves that the decades-long tragedy of our isolation was in the past, and we could bond with each other freely and with relish, now.

Neither Jamie nor I muffled our voices as we moaned and panted, our wet bodies slapping against each other. My ministrations on my own clitoris worked quickly, and soon the sounds of my climax were spilling out of me as I clenched tight around Jamie. He moved faster then, not holding back as he drove himself fast against me, and likely bruising my buttocks with the repeated assault of his hip bones.

My orgasm subsiding, he reached one hand forward to pull me up by one shoulder so that I was leaned back against his chest. “Kiss me, Sassenach,” he demanded.

I twisted my upper body and presented my open mouth so that he could explore it with his tongue as he continued pumping into me. Moments later, he bit down on my lip—not too hard—as his body tensed and he groaned. I could feel him, hot and throbbing inside my body, as he found his release. We tumbled on top of each other as we separated, panting with laughter as our heart rates returned to normal.

“I love you, Jamie,” I said, with a smile in my voice.

As sometimes happened in the aftermath of our lovemaking, Jamie lost his ability to communicate in English. “Tha gaol agam ort gu bràth,” he replied.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There may be one more chapter to come, a third epilogue but focused solely on Gavin, as at least one commenter requested. So, pretty squarely unrelated to the source material, but perhaps satisfying some readers who might like to find out how his time with Claire helped him reclaim his happiness, eventually meeting and falling in love with his second wife, Imogene. Comment if you'd rather the Gavin ficlet be more of an "origin story," and it could instead take us to his youth, exploring his time in the war and initial courtship with Mary. I haven't personally made up my mind which of the two options I'm more interested in fleshing out.


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